django-fakemessages - Generate fake language files for your Django Project

Introduction

Looking for missing translations in your Django project? Let's censor what is done and see what remains!

I wrote this while working on a project where translations were not enabled from the beginning. I ended up hunting every single string that was missing from the translation set, and comparing two languages by eye is tricky (even with a different alphabet).

So I wanted something much more obvious: a fake language that makes untranslated text stand out immediately. We even used it on stagings with non-developers to quickly understand whether a translation was simply missing or was not part of the .po files at all.

Resources

• Package on PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/django-fakemessages/
• Project on Github: https://github.com/pfouque/django-fakemessages

Requirements

• Django >=4.2
• Python >=3.10
• Translate-toolkit >=3.8.5

How to

1. Install

   $ pip install "django-fakemessages"
   

2. Register fakemessage in your list of Django applications:

   INSTALLED_APPS = [
       # ...
       "fakemessages",
       # ...
   ]
   

3. Update your settings:

   if DEBUG:
       """Add our fake language to Django"""
       from django.conf.locale import LANG_INFO
   
       FAKE_LANGUAGE_CODE = "kl"
   
       LANG_INFO[FAKE_LANGUAGE_CODE] = {
           "bidi": False,
           "code": FAKE_LANGUAGE_CODE,
           "name": "▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮",
           "name_local": "🖖 ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮",
       }
       LANGUAGES.append((FAKE_LANGUAGE_CODE, "🖖 ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮"))
   

4. 🎉 Voila!

Contribute

Principles

• Simple for developers to get up-and-running
• Consistent style (ruff)
• Future-proof (pyupgrade)
• Full type hinting (mypy)

Coding style

We use prek to run code quality tools. Install prek however you like (for example uv tool install prek) then set up Git hooks to run every time you commit with:

> prek install

You can then run all tools:

> prek run --all-files

It includes the following:

• uv for project and dependency management
• Ruff, black and pyupgrade linting
• mypy for type checking
• Github Actions for builds and CI

There are default config files for the linting and mypy.

Tests

Tests package

The package tests themselves are outside of the main library code, in a package that is itself a Django app (it contains models, settings, and any other artifacts required to run the tests (e.g. urls).) Where appropriate, this test app may be runnable as a Django project - so that developers can spin up the test app and see what admin screens look like, test migrations, etc.

Running tests

The tests themselves use pytest as the test runner. If you have installed the uv environment, you can run them thus:

$ uv run pytest

or

$ uv sync --dev
$ source .venv/bin/activate
(.venv) $ pytest

CI

• .github/workflows/lint.yml: Defines and ensure coding rules on Github.

• .github/workflows/test.yml: Runs tests on supported Python (3.12-3.14) with Django 6.0 in a GitHub matrix.

• .github/workflows/coverage.yml: Calculates the coverage on an up to date version.