django-makemessages-rs 0.3.0

A fast Rust alternative to Django's makemessages command

django-makemessages-rs

A fast Rust alternative to Django's makemessages command. Produces byte-identical .po file output compared to django-extended-makemessages.

Tested against a ~2000 file Django project with ~3000 translatable strings across 5 locales:

Tool	Time
django-extended-makemessages	~21s
django-makemessages-rs	~0.3s

Install

pip install django-makemessages-rs

Platform wheels are available for macOS (arm64, x86_64) and Linux (x86_64, aarch64).

Usage

django-makemessages-rs \
  -l en -l zh_Hant -l zh_Hans -l ko -l ja \
  --ignore .venv --ignore node_modules \
  --no-location --no-flags --sort-output \
  --no-fuzzy-matching --keep-header \
  --locale-dir locale

CI check mode

Use --check to verify translation files are in sync with source code. Exits with code 1 if any .po file would change:

django-makemessages-rs \
  -l en -l zh_Hant \
  --ignore .venv --ignore node_modules \
  --no-location --no-flags --sort-output \
  --no-fuzzy-matching --keep-header \
  --locale-dir locale \
  --check

Options

-l, --locale <LOCALES>       Locales to generate (required, repeatable)
-i, --ignore <PATTERNS>      Patterns to ignore (directories/files)
-d, --domain <DOMAIN>        Domain name [default: django]
-e, --extension <EXTS>       File extensions to examine [default: html txt py]
    --root <PATH>            Root directory to scan [default: .]
    --locale-dir <PATH>      Locale directory [default: locale]
    --no-location            Don't write #: filename:line lines
    --no-flags               Don't write #, flags lines
    --sort-output            Generate sorted output
    --no-fuzzy-matching      Do not use fuzzy matching
    --keep-header            Keep the existing .po file header
    --no-obsolete            Remove obsolete message strings
    --no-wrap                Don't break long message lines
    --check                  Exit with error if .po files would change (dry-run)
    --timing                 Show timing information

How it works

1. Walks the project tree using ignore (same engine as ripgrep)
2. Extracts translatable strings from .py and .html/.txt templates in parallel using rayon
3. Merges extracted strings with existing .po files, preserving translations
4. Writes updated .po files

The extractor handles:

• Python gettext(), ngettext(), pgettext(), npgettext() and the _() alias
• Django template tags: {% trans %}, {% translate %}, {% blocktrans %}, {% blocktranslate %}
• {% blocktrans trimmed %} whitespace collapsing
• {% blocktrans %}...{% plural %}...{% endblocktrans %} plural forms
• Python implicit string concatenation (_("foo" "bar"))
• Template variable substitution ({{ var }} to %(var)s)
• Literal % escaping to %%

No Django settings or DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE required — runs as a standalone CLI.

Pre-commit / Git hooks integration

Add to your pyproject.toml dev dependencies:

"django-makemessages-rs"

Then in your pre-commit script:

uv run django-makemessages-rs \
  -l en -l zh_Hant \
  --ignore .venv --ignore node_modules \
  --no-location --no-flags --sort-output \
  --no-fuzzy-matching --keep-header \
  --locale-dir locale

License

MIT