Set Up Polyglot

Updated: Sep 11, 2020 2 minutes to read

Just install Polyglot like a normal Jekyll plugin. Its gem name is jekyll-polyglot.

There are several common ways to install a Jekyll plugin:

Directly add the plugin’s gem name to the Gemfile for your site:
```
gem "jekyll-polyglot"
```
Then, enable the plugin in _config.yml:
```
plugins:
  - jekyll-polyglot
```
Finally, run bundle install.

I recommend this method if you plan to work on your site on different machines, e.g. multiple computers, your computer and a server, or your computer and a CI environment.
Create a Bundle group called :jekyll_plugins in the Gemfile, and add the plugin’s gem name to it:
```
group :jekyll_plugins do
    gem "jekyll-polyglot"
end
```
With this method, you don’t need to modify _config.yml, so just run bundle install directly.

Keep in mind, the plugins you install in this way will always load even if you run Jekyll in --safe mode.
Register the plugin in only _config.yml:
```
plugins:
  - jekyll-polyglot
```
Then install it with gem install jekyll-polyglot.

A drawback of this method is your plugins won’t be automatically installed if you set up your site from another machine with bundle: you should run the gem command again for plugins.

After plugin installation, add configuration options for Polyglot to _config.yml:

languages: ["en", "zh"]
default_lang: "en"
exclude_from_localization: ["assets/css", "assets/img"]
parallel_localization: true

sass:
  sourcemap: never

The first four lines are just normal Polyglot preferences:

languages is an array of ISO 639-1 codes for the languages your site supports.
default_lang is the code for your site’s default language.
exclude_from_localization is an array of directories where the files should be commonly shared for all languages. I suggest you at least add the directory for your site’s images here, so the images will not be copied for every localized version of your site during site generation, saving disk spaces.
parallel_localization indicates whether localization is run parallel during site generation. According to Polyglot’s documentation, if you are building your site on Windows, you might need to set this to false.

The sass.sourcemap option is a workaround for Polyglot’s issue with Jekyll 4.0. To be honest, I don’t really understand what that issue is, but including that option in my configuration has not caused any problems yet.