awx-en-only

A thin fork/overlay on top of ansible/awx that builds and publishes production AWX container images with all locales except en-us removed.

Why

AWX picks its UI language based on navigator.languages (the browser's language preference list). There is no in-app language selector (see #15334), and the locale cannot be overridden via Accept-Language headers or JS property patching at runtime.

The Dutch (nl) locale shipped with AWX 24.6.1 has poor translation quality that degrades the UX for Dutch-speaking users. This fork strips every non-en-us locale at build time so the UI always renders in English.

How it works

The GitHub Actions workflow in .github/workflows/build.yml:

1. Checks out the upstream AWX source at the tag pinned in awx-version.txt.
2. Deletes every locale directory except English from two locations (which use different names for English):
   • awx/locale/*/ — Django back-end .po / .mo files (keep en-us)
   • awx/ui/src/locales/*/ — LinguiJS front-end .po catalogs (keep en)
3. Rewrites the UI's i18nLoader.js locales map down to en so that any non-English browser falls back to English instead of trying to load a catalog that was deleted.
4. Renders AWX's Jinja2 Dockerfile.j2 template into a real Dockerfile.
5. Builds and pushes the image to GHCR as ghcr.io/<your-org>/awx:<awx-version>.

Upgrading to a new AWX release

Edit awx-version.txt, commit, and push. The workflow will build the new version automatically on the next push to main, or you can trigger it manually via Actions → Build and Publish AWX (en-US only) → Run workflow.

Using the image

In your AWX Operator AWX custom resource, set:

spec:
  image: ghcr.io/<your-org>/awx
  image_version: 24.6.1

Applying extra patches

Drop any .patch files (generated with git format-patch or git diff) into the patches/ directory. They will be applied to the upstream source before the build. This is useful for cherry-picking upstream bug fixes or backporting your own changes alongside the locale strip.

Locale locations inside AWX (reference)

Location	Format	Purpose
awx/locale/<lang>/LC_MESSAGES/django.po	GNU gettext	Back-end strings rendered server-side (English = en-us)
awx/ui/src/locales/<lang>/messages.po	LinguiJS	Front-end strings compiled into JS chunks (English = en)

Both are compiled during the UI build (compilemessages.py + lingui compile) inside the Docker image. Removing the directories is necessary but not sufficient: the UI's i18nLoader.js locales map must also be trimmed to en, otherwise a non-English browser tries to dynamically import a deleted catalog. The workflow handles this automatically.

Supported locales in AWX 24.6.1 (for reference)

• Back-end (awx/locale/): en-us, es, fr, ja, ko, nl, zh
• Front-end (awx/ui/src/locales/): en, es, fr, ja, ko, nl, zh, plus zu (a pseudo-locale used only for translation testing)