atilafassina/rosetta

Rosetta is a starter template for building Next.js websites that work in multiple languages. Instead of starting from scratch, you clone this repo and get a pre-configured project with language routing already built in, so visitors to your site can seamlessly switch between different language versions using clean URLs like /en/about or /fr/about. The template bundles together a few specific choices: it uses Emotion for styling, TypeScript for safer code, and Nodemon to automatically restart your development server when you make changes. The key opinion here is that it sets up multi-language support as a first-class feature rather than something you bolt on later. You configure which languages your app supports and which one is the default, and the routing handles the rest. However, there's a meaningful tradeoff worth understanding. To make language routing work the way the creator wanted, the project uses what's called a "custom server", essentially running Node.js code alongside Next.js instead of letting Next.js run entirely on its own. This gives more control, but it also means you lose some of Next.js's built-in performance optimizations and deployment simplicity. The README is upfront about this: it's not recommended for everyone, and the creator is still actively developing the project, so it's not ready for production use yet. This would appeal to a founder or PM building a consumer product, marketplace, or content platform that needs to work globally from day one. Rather than launching in one language and retrofitting multi-language support later, you'd start with the infrastructure in place. Just be aware the project is still early and the custom server approach comes with engineering tradeoffs you'd want to discuss with your development team.