Localization

This article explains how to set up language and locale for the entire system and apps in particular.

Locale

Locale names are typically of the form language[_territory][.codeset][@modifier] , where language is an ISO 639 language code, territory is an ISO 3166 country code, and codeset is a character set or encoding identifier like ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8.

To set up your locale you need to change LANG and LC_COLLATE in /etc/profile.d/locale.sh file.

Config for Russian language, for example:

/etc/profile.d/locale.sh

export CHARSET=UTF-8
export LANG=ru_RU.UTF-8
export LC_COLLATE=ru_RU

From now software, that has the translations files will use selected language.

Languages packages

In Alpine Linux, translations for applications are shipped in a separate package with -lang at the end of their name. Usually, it can be easily found by $ apk list packagename-lang or $ apk list packagename-lang-* , if each language ships in separate package (like libreoffice).

It's possible to automatically install -lang subpackages for installed software by installing lang metapackage: $ apk add lang