🌍 WordPress translations with PTC — GitLab CI

Push a change to your .pot file. The pipeline translates it and opens a merge request with the results.

The job in .gitlab-ci.yml is the recipe PTC prints on its CI/CD setup screen, copied here unchanged.

📦 What's here

.gitlab-ci.yml      the pipeline
.ptc-config.yml     what to translate, and where results go
languages/
  examplewp.pot     source strings
  examplewp-*.po    translations, as PTC delivers them
  examplewp-*.mo

⚙️ The config

source_locale: en
files:
  - file: languages/examplewp.pot
    output: languages/examplewp-{{lang}}.po
    additional_translation_files:
      - type: mo
        path: languages/examplewp-{{lang}}.mo
      - type: wp
        path: languages/examplewp-{{lang}}.json
      - type: php
        path: languages/examplewp-{{lang}}.l10n.php

One .pot in, four files out per language. {{lang}} becomes de_DE, es, fr_FR…

That's the WordPress part: the .mo WordPress loads, the .json its JavaScript reads, and the .l10n.php that WordPress 6.5+ prefers — all from one translation pass, no msgfmt in your build.

🚀 Use it in your repo

1. Copy .gitlab-ci.yml and .ptc-config.yml, point the config at your .pot.
2. Settings → CI/CD → Variables → add PTC_API_TOKEN (masked; protected if your default branch is).
3. Let the job push. It uses CI_JOB_TOKEN, which needs Settings → CI/CD → Job token permissions → Allow Git push requests to the repository (GitLab 18.4+, off by default). Prefer not to? Add PTC_GIT_PUSH_TOKEN — a project access token with write_repository.

🔁 Why it can't loop

The job runs only on a push to the default branch, pushes to ptc/translations, and skips any commit marked [skip translations] — which is what its own commit says.

The marker is checked in rules:, not written as [skip ci]: [skip ci] would create no pipeline at all, leaving the translation MR untested and unmergeable wherever Pipelines must succeed is on.

🧹 Why the MR stays clean

The CLI writes a manifest of the files it produced, and the commit stages that — not git add .. Anything else in the working tree stays out, including the CLI itself, which is downloaded to /tmp.

🐙 On GitHub instead?

Use the PTC Translate action.