Installing on RedHat, Fedora and CentOS#

Hardware requirements#

Weblate should run on any contemporary hardware without problems, the following is the minimal configuration required to run Weblate on a single host (Weblate, database and webserver):

3 GB of RAM
2 CPU cores
1 GB of storage space

The more memory the better - it is used for caching on all levels (filesystem, database and Weblate).

Many concurrent users increases the amount of needed CPU cores. For hundreds of translation components at least 4 GB of RAM is recommended.

The typical database storage usage is around 300 MB per 1 million hosted words. Storage space needed for cloned repositories varies, but Weblate tries to keep their size minimal by doing shallow clones.

Note

Actual requirements for your installation of Weblate vary heavily based on the size of the translations managed in it.

Installation#

System requirements#

Install the dependencies needed to build the Python modules (see Software requirements):

dnf install \
   libxslt-devel libxml2-devel freetype-devel libjpeg-devel zlib-devel \
   libyaml-devel libffi-devel cairo-devel cairo-gobject-devel pango-devel \
   gobject-introspection-devel libacl-devel python3-pip python3-virtualenv \
   libtool-ltdl-devel python3-devel git

Install wanted optional dependencies depending on features you intend to use (see Optional dependencies):

dnf install tesseract-langpack-eng tesseract-devel leptonica-devel
dnf install openldap-devel libsasl2-devel
dnf install xmlsec1-devel

Optionally install software for running production server, see Running server, Database setup for Weblate, Background tasks using Celery. Depending on size of your installation you might want to run these components on dedicated servers.

The local installation instructions:

# Web server option 1: NGINX and uWSGI
dnf install nginx uwsgi uwsgi-plugin-python3

# Web server option 2: Apache with ``mod_wsgi``
dnf install apache2 apache2-mod_wsgi

# Caching backend: Redis
dnf install redis

# Database server: PostgreSQL
dnf install postgresql postgresql-contrib

# SMTP server
dnf install postfix

Python modules#

Hint

We’re using virtualenv to install Weblate in a separate environment from your system. If you are not familiar with it, check virtualenv User Guide.

Create the virtualenv for Weblate:
```
virtualenv ~/weblate-env
```
Activate the virtualenv for Weblate:
```
. ~/weblate-env/bin/activate
```
Install Weblate including all optional dependencies:
```
# Install Weblate with all optional dependencies
pip install "Weblate[all]"
```
Please check Optional dependencies for fine-tuning of optional dependencies.
Note

On some Linux distributions running Weblate fails with libffi error:
```
ffi_prep_closure(): bad user_data (it seems that the version of the libffi library seen at runtime is different from the 'ffi.h' file seen at compile-time)
```
This is caused by incompatibility of binary packages distributed via PyPI with the distribution. To address this, you need to rebuild the package on your system:
```
pip install --force-reinstall --no-binary :all: cffi
```

Configuring Weblate#

Note

The following assumes the virtualenv used by Weblate is activated (by executing . ~/weblate-env/bin/activate). If not, specify the full path to the weblate command as ~/weblate-env/bin/weblate.

Copy the file ~/weblate-env/lib/python3.9/site-packages/weblate/settings_example.py to ~/weblate-env/lib/python3.9/site-packages/weblate/settings.py.
Adjust the values in the new settings.py file to your liking. You will need to provide at least the database credentials and Django secret key, but you will want more changes for production setup, see Adjusting configuration.
Create the database and its structure for Weblate (the example settings use PostgreSQL, check Database setup for Weblate for a production-ready setup):
```
weblate migrate
```
Create an account for the administrator user and copy its password to the clipboard, and also save it for later use:
```
weblate createadmin
```
Collect the static files for your web server (see Running server and Serving static files):
```
weblate collectstatic
```
Compress the JavaScript and CSS files (optional, see Compressing client assets):
```
weblate compress
```
Start the Celery workers. This is not necessary for development purposes, but strongly recommended otherwise. Background tasks using Celery has more info:
```
~/weblate-env/lib/python3.9/site-packages/weblate/examples/celery start
```
Start the development server (Running server details a production setup):
```
weblate runserver
```

After installation#

Congratulations, your Weblate server is now running and you can start using it.

You can now access Weblate on http://localhost:8000/.
Sign in with admin credentials obtained during installation or register with new users.
You can now run Weblate commands using weblate command when Weblate virtualenv is active, see Management commands.
You can stop the test server with Ctrl+C.
Review potential issues with your installation either on /manage/performance/ URL (see Management interface) or using weblate check --deploy, see Production setup.

Adding translation#

Open the admin interface (http://localhost:8000/create/project/) and create the project you want to translate. See Project configuration for more details.

All you need to specify here is the project name and its website.
Create a component which is the real object for translation - it points to the VCS repository, and selects which files to translate. See Component configuration for more details.

The important fields here are: Component name, Source code repository, and File mask for finding translatable files. Weblate supports a wide range of formats including GNU gettext, Android string resources, Apple iOS strings, Java properties, Stringsdict format or Fluent format, see Supported file formats for more details.
Once the above is completed (it can be lengthy process depending on the size of your VCS repository, and number of messages to translate), you can start translating.