Generic

The generic adapter runs any project whose locale files you can name: Svelte, Astro, Rails, Vue, a design system package, a monorepo of shared catalogs, or a framework the kit has never heard of. Declare both localeDirs and defaultLocale in your kit config — one key without the other does not activate it — and those exact paths are used, resolved against the project directory. A path that does not exist is an error naming it. Declaring both keys on a Next.js project takes the project away from that framework's adapter, see Detection.

Declare neither and a project with no framework signals still resolves from locales, src/locales, i18n/locales, src/i18n/locales or src/i18n — the first one holding locale files, as a single layer named default, with the first locale code in sorted order as the default locale.

A layer is a scoped locale directory — a Nuxt layer, a workspace package, a shared UI library, or one app in a monorepo. You get one per entry, and this is the one adapter where you name them yourself:

import { defineI18nKitConfig } from '@the-i18n-kit/cli/config'

export default defineI18nKitConfig({
  defaultLocale: 'en',
  localeDirs: [
    'apps/web/locales',
    { path: 'packages/ui/locales', layer: 'ui' },
    { path: 'packages/emails/locales', layer: 'emails' },
  ],
})

Those names are what --layer accepts and what per-layer reports are keyed by, so choose them deliberately. A plain string entry is named default. The same shape works in .i18n-mcp.json.

Overrides

Beyond the two required keys:

Limits

• The file format is inferred from the first locale directory only. A set of directories in mixed formats resolves as whatever the first one looks like, and localeFileFormat is honored by the Laravel adapter, not this one.
• YAML locale files are read and written, .yaml and .yml alike — flat (en.yaml, de-DE.yml) or a directory per locale. A directory mixing formats resolves to whichever has the most files and warns, and comments do not survive a write: files are re-serialized from their values, so keep notes for translators in localeNotes rather than in the locale files.
• Locale codes are unioned across directories. A directory holding a deliberate subset needs locales declared, or its absent codes are reported as missing.
• Paths resolve against the project directory. Commit relative paths; an absolute path in a committed config works for its author only.