Developing Views and Apps for Splunk Web

UI internationalization

If you want to internationalize the Splunk Web UI, you can localization tools to:

• Translate text generated by Python code, JavaScript code, views, menus and Mako templates.
• Set language/locale specific alternatives for static resources such as images, CSS, other media.
• Create new languages or locales.
• Format times, dates and other numerical strings.

When you log in to Splunk Enterprise, Splunk Web uses the language that your browser is set to. If you want to switch languages, change your browser settings.

Splunk Enterprise detects locale strings. A locale string contains two components: a language specifier and a localization specifier. This is usually presented as two lowercase letters and two uppercase letters linked by an underscore. For example, en_US means US English while en_GB means British English.

When looking for a suitable translation, Splunk Enterprise first tries to find an exact match for the whole locale, but falls back to just the language specifier if the entire setting is not available. For example, translations for fr answer to requests for fr_CA and fr_FR (French, Canada and France respectively). The user's locale also affects the formatting of dates, times, numbers, and other localized settings. Different countries have differing standards on how to format these entities.

Configuration

Splunk Enterprise uses the gettext internationalization and localization system. When using gettext, you typically use an editor to create, generate, and edit the files used to localize strings in an application. Splunk recommends Poedit, a free, open source editor for localization.

To translate Splunk Enterprise, follow these directions:

1. Create a directory for the locale. For example, to create the fictional locale mz, create the following directory:

$SPLUNK_HOME/lib/python2.7/site-packages/splunk/appserver/mrsparkle/locale/mz_MZ/LC_MESSAGES/

2. Load the following messages.pot file into your PO editor.

$SPLUNK_HOME/lib/python2.7/site-packages/splunk/appserver/mrsparkle/locale/messages.pot

3. Use the PO editor to translate any strings you want to localize. Save the file as messages.po in the directory you created in step 2. The PO editor also saves a messages.mo file, which is the machine readable version of the PO file.

4. Restart Splunk. There are no other configuration files to edit. Splunk detects the new language files when it restarts.

Localization files

Splunk Enterprise stores localization information at the following location:

$SPLUNK_HOME/lib/python<version>/site-packages/splunk/appserver/mrsparkle/locale/...

• messages.pot: Holds the strings to translate. Use a PO editor to edit these files.

• <locale_string>: The directory containing localization files for the locale specified by <locale_string> (for example, ja_JP).

• <locale_string>/LC_MESSAGES/messages.po: Contains the source strings specified for localization in messages.pot. Using a PO editor, provide the translations for these strings.

• <locale_string>/LC_MESSAGES/messages.mo: A machine readable version of messages.po that Splunk uses to find translated strings. The PO editor creates this for you when it creates the messages.po file.

Localize dates and numbers

You can format numbers and dates to the standards of a locale without having to translate any text. For this scenario, copy the contents of the en_US directory to the target locale directory.

For example, to enable localization of numbers and dates for the de_CH locale (German – Switzerland), copy the contents of the following directory:

$SPLUNK_HOME/lib/python2.7/site-packages/splunk/appserver/mrsparkle/locale/en_US 

and place them here:

$SPLUNK_HOME/lib/python2.7/site-packages/splunk/appserver/mrsparkle/locale/de_CH

Translate Apps

You can also use gettext to translate apps. However, most apps must be translated in their own locale subdirectory. Apps that ship with Splunk Enterprise are automatically extracted and their text included in the core messages.pot file. You do not need to handle them separately.

To extract the strings from an installed application, ready to be translated in a PO editor, run the following command from Splunk Enterprise command line:

splunk extract i18n -app <appname>

This creates a locale/ subdirectory in the app's root directory and populates it with a messages.pot file. Then, follow the steps above to translate the strings within the app. When using views from a different app, the new messages.pot file contains the strings for these views.

Locale-specific resources

Splunk Enterpise stores static resources such as images, CSS files, and other media as subdirectories at the following location:

$SPLUNK_HOME/share/splunk/search_mrsparkle/exposed/

When serving these resources, Splunk Enterprise checks to see whether a locale-specific version of the resource is available before falling back to the default resource. For example, if your locale is set to fr_FR, Splunk Enterprise searches for the logo image file in the following order:

• exposed/img/skins/default/logo-mrsparkle-fr_FR.gif
• exposed/img/skins/default/logo-mrsparkle-fr.gif
• exposed/img/skins/default/logo-mrsparkle.gif

Splunk Enterprise follows the same path to load HTML templates (including any views) that define each page in the UI. This can be useful for languages that require a modified layout that CSS alone cannot accommodate (right to left text for example).