Access control

Weblate comes with a fine-grained privilege system to assign user permissions for the whole instance, or in a limited scope.

Changed in version 3.0: Before Weblate 3.0, the privilege system was based on Django privilege system only, but is specifically built for Weblate now. If using anything older, please consult the documentation for the specific version you are using.

Simple access control

If you are not administrating the whole Weblate installation and just have access to manage certain projects (like on Hosted Weblate), your access control management options are limited to following settings. If you don’t need any complex setup, those are sufficient for you.

Project access control

Note

Projects running the gratis Libre plan on Hosted Weblate are always Public. You can switch to the paid plan if you want to restrict access to your project.

You can limit user’s access to individual projects by selecting a different Access control setting. Available options are:

Public

Visible to everybody.

Any authenticated user can contribute.

VCS repository might be exposed to everybody.

Choose this for open-source projects, or when your Weblate instance is private or locked-down.

Protected

Visible to everybody.

Only chosen users can contribute.

Only chosen users can access VCS repository.

Choose this to gain visibility, but still have control over who can contribute.

Private

Visible only to chosen users.

Only chosen users can contribute.

Only chosen users can access VCS repository.

Choose this for projects that should not be exposed publicly at all.

Custom

Visible only to chosen users.

Only chosen users can contribute.

Only chosen users can access VCS repository.

Not available on Hosted Weblate.

You will have to set up all the permissions using Custom access control.

Choose this on your own Weblate instance if you want to define access in a specific, finely customizable way.

Access control can be changed in the Access tab of the configuration (Manage ↓ Settings) of each respective project.

The default value can be changed by DEFAULT_ACCESS_CONTROL.

Note

Even for Private projects, some info about your project will be exposed: statistics and language summary for the whole instance will include counts for all projects despite the access control setting. Your project name and other information can’t be revealed through this.

Note

The actual set of permissions available for users by default in Public, Protected, and Private projects can be redefined by Weblate instance administrator using custom settings.

See also

Access control

Managing per-project access control

Users with the Manage project access privilege (see List of privileges and built-in roles) can manage users in projects via adding them to the teams. The initial collection of teams is provided by Weblate, but additional ones can be defined providing more fine-grained access control. You can limit teams to languages and assign them designated access roles (see List of privileges and built-in roles).

The following teams are automatically created for every project:

For Public, Protected and Private projects:

Administration

Includes all permissions available for the project.

Review (only if review workflow is turned on)

Can approve translations during review.

For Protected and Private projects only:

Translate

Can translate the project and upload translations made offline.

Sources

Can edit source strings (if allowed in the project settings) and source string info.

Languages

Can manage translated languages (add or remove translations).

Glossary

Can manage glossary (add or remove entries, also upload).

Memory

Can manage translation memory.

Screenshots

Can manage screenshots (add or remove them, and associate them to source strings).

Automatic translation

Can use automatic translation.

VCS

Can manage VCS and access the exported repository.

Billing

Can access billing info and settings (see Billing).

These features are available on the Access control page, which can be accessed from the project’s menu Manage ↓ Users.

Team administrators

New in version 4.15.

Each team can have team administrator, who can add and remove users within the team. This is useful in case you want to build self-governed teams.

New user invitation

Also, besides adding an existing user to the project, it is possible to invite new ones. Any new user will be created immediately, but the account will remain inactive until signing in with a link in the invitation sent via an e-mail. It is not required to have any site-wide privileges in order to do so, access management permission on the project’s scope (e.g. a membership in the Administration team) would be sufficient.

Hint

If the invited user missed the validity of the invitation, they can set their password using invited e-mail address in the password reset form as the account is created already.

New in version 3.11: It is possible to resend the e-mail for user invitations (invalidating any previously sent invitation).

The same kind of invitations are available site-wide from the management interface on the Users tab.

Blocking users

New in version 4.7.

In case some users behave badly in your project, you have an option to block them from contributing. The blocked user still will be able to see the project if he has permissions for that, but he won’t be able to contribute.

Per-project permission management

You can set your projects to Protected or Private, and manage users per-project in the Weblate user interface.

By default this prevents Weblate from granting access provided by Users and Viewers default teams due to these teams’ own configuration. This doesn’t prevent you from granting permissions to those projects site-wide by altering default teams, creating a new one, or creating additional custom settings for individual component as described in Custom access control below.

One of the main benefits of managing permissions through the Weblate user interface is that you can delegate it to other users without giving them the superuser privilege. In order to do so, add them to the Administration team of the project.

Custom access control

Note

This feature is unavailable on Hosted Weblate.

The permission system is based on teams and roles, where roles define a set of permissions, and teams link them to users and translations, see Users, roles, teams, and permissions for more details.

The most powerful features of the Weblate’s access control system for now are available only through the Django admin interface. You can use it to manage permissions of any project. You don’t necessarily have to switch it to Custom access control to utilize it. However you must have superuser privileges in order to use it.

If you are not interested in details of implementation, and just want to create a simple-enough configuration based on the defaults, or don’t have a site-wide access to the whole Weblate installation (like on Hosted Weblate), please refer to the Simple access control section.

Common setups

This section contains an overview of some common configurations you may be interested in.

Site-wide permission management

To manage permissions for a whole instance at once, add users to appropriate default teams:

• Users (this is done by default by the automatic team assignment).

• Reviewers (if you are using review workflow with dedicated reviewers).

• Managers (if you want to delegate most of the management operations to somebody else).

You should keep all projects configured as Public (see Project access control), otherwise the site-wide permissions provided by membership in the Users and Reviewers teams won’t have any effect.

You may also grant some additional permissions of your choice to the default teams. For example, you may want to give a permission to manage screenshots to all the Users.

You can define some new custom teams as well. If you want to keep managing your permissions site-wide for these teams, choose an appropriate value for the Project selection (e.g. All projects or All public projects).

Custom permissions for languages, components or projects

You can create your own dedicated teams to manage permissions for distinct objects such as languages, components, and projects. Although these teams can only grant additional privileges, you can’t revoke any permission granted by site-wide or per-project teams by adding another custom team.

Example:

If you want (for whatever reason) to allow translation to a specific language (lets say Czech) only to a closed set of reliable translators while keeping translations to other languages public, you will have to:

1. Remove the permission to translate Czech from all the users. In the default configuration this can be done by altering the Users default team.

   Group Users

   Language selection	As defined
   Languages	All but Czech

2. Add a dedicated team for Czech translators.

   Group Czech translators

   Roles	Power users
   Project selection	All public projects
   Language selection	As defined
   Languages	Czech

3. Add users you wish to give the permissions to into this team.

As you can see, permissions management this way is powerful, but can be quite a tedious job. You can’t delegate it to another user, unless granting superuser permissions.

Users, roles, teams, and permissions

The authentication models consist of several objects:

Permission

Individual permission defined by Weblate. Permissions cannot be assigned to users. This can only be done through assignment of roles.

Role

A role defines a set of permissions. This allows reuse of these sets in several places, making the administration easier.

User

User can belong to several teams.

Group

Group connect roles, users, and authentication objects (projects, languages, and component lists).

Note

A team can have no roles assigned to it, in that case access to browse the project by anyone is assumed (see below).

Access for browse to a project

A user has to be a member of a team linked to the project, or any component inside that project. Having membership is enough, no specific permissions are needed to browse the project (this is used in the default Viewers team, see List of teams).

Access for browse to a component

A user can access unrestricted components once able to access the components’ project (and will have all the permissions the user was granted for the project). With Restricted access turned on, access to the component requires explicit permissions for the component (or a component list the component is in).

Scope of teams

The scope of the permission assigned by the roles in the teams are applied by the following rules:

• If the team specifies any Component list, all the permissions given to members of that team are granted for all the components in the component lists attached to the team, and an access with no additional permissions is granted for all the projects these components are in. Components and Projects are ignored.

• If the team specifies any Components, all the permissions given to the members of that team are granted for all the components attached to the team, and an access with no additional permissions is granted for all the projects these components are in. Projects are ignored.

• Otherwise, if the team specifies any Projects, either by directly listing them or by having Projects selection set to a value like All public projects, all those permissions are applied to all the projects, which effectively grants the same permissions to access all projects unrestricted components.

• The restrictions imposed by a team’s Languages are applied separately, when it’s verified if a user has an access to perform certain actions. Namely, it’s applied only to actions directly related to the translation process itself like reviewing, saving translations, adding suggestions, etc.

Hint

Use Language selection or Project selection to automate inclusion of all languages or projects.

Example:

Let’s say there is a project foo with the components: foo/bar and foo/baz and the following team:

Group Spanish Admin-Reviewers

Roles	Review Strings, Manage repository
Components	foo/bar
Languages	Spanish

Members of that team will have following permissions (assuming the default role settings):

• General (browsing) access to the whole project foo including both components in it: foo/bar and foo/baz.

• Review strings in foo/bar Spanish translation (not elsewhere).

• Manage VCS for the whole foo/bar repository e.g. commit pending changes made by translators for all languages.

Automatic team assignments

On the bottom of the Group editing page in the Django admin interface, you can specify Automatic team assignments, which is a list of regular expressions used to automatically assign newly created users to a team based on their e-mail addresses. This assignment only happens upon account creation.

The most common use-case for the feature is to assign all new users to some default team. In order to do so, you will probably want to keep the default value (^.*$) in the regular expression field. Another use-case for this option might be to give some additional privileges to employees of your company by default. Assuming all of them use corporate e-mail addresses on your domain, this can be accomplished with an expression like ^.*@mycompany.com.

Note

Automatic team assignment to Users and Viewers is always recreated when upgrading from one Weblate version to another. If you want to turn it off, set the regular expression to ^$ (which won’t match anything).

Note

As for now, there is no way to bulk-add already existing users to some team via the user interface. For that, you may resort to using the REST API.

Default teams and roles

After installation, a default set of teams is created (see List of teams).

These roles and teams are created upon installation. The built-in roles are always kept up to date by the database migration when upgrading. You can’t actually change them, please define a new role if you want to define your own set of permissions.

List of privileges and built-in roles

Scope	Permission	Roles
Billing (see Billing)	View billing info	Administration, Billing
Changes	Download changes	Administration
Comments	Post comment	Administration, Edit source, Power user, Review strings, Translate
	Delete comment	Administration
	Resolve comment	Administration, Review strings
Component	Edit component settings	Administration
	Lock component, preventing translations	Administration
Glossary	Add glossary entry	Administration, Manage glossary, Power user
	Edit glossary entry	Administration, Manage glossary, Power user
	Delete glossary entry	Administration, Manage glossary, Power user
	Upload glossary entries	Administration, Manage glossary, Power user
Automatic suggestions	Use automatic suggestions	Administration, Edit source, Power user, Review strings, Translate
Translation memory	Edit translation memory	Administration, Manage translation memory
	Delete translation memory	Administration, Manage translation memory
Projects	Edit project settings	Administration
	Manage project access	Administration
Reports	Download reports	Administration
Screenshots	Add screenshot	Administration, Manage screenshots
	Edit screenshot	Administration, Manage screenshots
	Delete screenshot	Administration, Manage screenshots
Source strings	Edit additional string info	Administration, Edit source
Strings	Add new string	Administration
	Remove a string	Administration
	Dismiss failing check	Administration, Edit source, Power user, Review strings, Translate
	Edit strings	Administration, Edit source, Power user, Review strings, Translate
	Review strings	Administration, Review strings
	Edit string when suggestions are enforced	Administration, Review strings
	Edit source strings	Administration, Edit source, Power user
Suggestions	Accept suggestion	Administration, Edit source, Power user, Review strings, Translate
	Add suggestion	Administration, Edit source, Add suggestion, Power user, Review strings, Translate
	Delete suggestion	Administration, Power user
	Vote on suggestion	Administration, Edit source, Power user, Review strings, Translate
Translations	Add language for translation	Administration, Power user, Manage languages
	Perform automatic translation	Administration, Automatic translation
	Delete existing translation	Administration, Manage languages
	Download translation file	Administration, Edit source, Access repository, Power user, Review strings, Translate, Manage languages
	Add several languages for translation	Administration, Manage languages
Uploads	Define author of uploaded translation	Administration
	Overwrite existing strings with upload	Administration, Edit source, Power user, Review strings, Translate
	Upload translations	Administration, Edit source, Power user, Review strings, Translate
VCS	Access the internal repository	Administration, Access repository, Power user, Manage repository
	Commit changes to the internal repository	Administration, Manage repository
	Push change from the internal repository	Administration, Manage repository
	Reset changes in the internal repository	Administration, Manage repository
	View upstream repository location	Administration, Access repository, Power user, Manage repository
	Update the internal repository	Administration, Manage repository
Site wide privileges	Use management interface
	Add new projects
	Add language definitions
	Manage language definitions
	Manage teams
	Manage users
	Manage roles
	Manage announcements
	Manage translation memory
	Manage machinery
	Manage component lists

Note

Site-wide privileges are not granted to any default role. These are powerful and quite close to superuser status. Most of them affect all projects in your Weblate installation.

List of teams

The following teams are created upon installation (or after executing weblate setupgroups) and you are free to modify them. The migration will, however, re-create them if you delete or rename them.

Guests

Defines permissions for non-authenticated users.

This team only contains anonymous users (see ANONYMOUS_USER_NAME).

You can remove roles from this team to limit permissions for non-authenticated users.

Default roles: Add suggestion, Access repository

Viewers

This role ensures visibility of public projects for all users. By default, all users are members of this team.

By default, automatic team assignment makes all new accounts members of this team when they join.

Default roles: none

Users

Default team for all users.

By default, automatic team assignment makes all new accounts members of this team when they join.

Default roles: Power user

Reviewers

Group for reviewers (see Translation workflows).

Default roles: Review strings

Managers

Group for administrators.

Default roles: Administration

Warning

Never remove the predefined Weblate teams and users as this can lead to unexpected problems! If you have no use for them, you can removing all their privileges instead.

Additional access restrictions

If you want to use your Weblate installation in a less public manner, i.e. allow new users on an invitational basis only, it can be done by configuring Weblate in such a way that only known users have an access to it. In order to do so, you can set REGISTRATION_OPEN to False to prevent registrations of any new users, and set REQUIRE_LOGIN to /.* to require signing in to access all the site pages. This is basically the way to lock your Weblate installation.

Hint

You can use built-in New user invitation to add new users.