Lmod Localization

Lmod places all messages, warning and error messages into a file. It also uses a slightly modified version of the i18n package from:

https://github.com/kikito/i18n.lua

to allow for translate into multiple languages. The standard message file is in messageDir/en.lua. Other languages are such as French, Spanish, German, and Mandarin Chinese are available. You can submit pull requests if you wish to have other languages. Lmod uses the LANG variable to pick which language to use. Note that Lmod only uses the first part of the LANG variable to choose which language to use. So there is only one version of English and one version of Spanish and so on. So a typical value of LANG is:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Lmod removes from the underscore on and just uses “en”. A site can also configure Lmod or set LMOD_LANG to override $LANG.

Site Tailoring

It is also possible to modify the standard messages to be tailored for a site. You can leave the Language to be English but change the value of a particular message to better match your site. For example you might change message e118 (as seen in messageDir/en.lua). Please note that the message string should be on one line.:

e118 = "User module collection: \\"%{collection}\\" does not exist.\\n  Try \\"module savelist\\" for possible choices.\\n",

by creating a file called: /path/to/site_msgs.lua:

return {
     site = {
         e118 = "User module collection: \\"%{collection}\\" does not exist.\\n  Try \\"module savelist\\" for possible choices.  For questions see https://...\\n";,
     }
 }

Then configure Lmod (or set env var. LMOD_SITE_MSG_FILE) to use /path/to/site_msg.lua.