The manage.py commands are administration commands provided by Django, Pootle or any external Django app being used with Pootle. How you run manage commands depends on how you installed Pootle.

If you run Pootle from a checkout (either directly from SVN or from a release tarball) you can use the manage.py file found in the main Pootle directory.

For example, to get information about all available manage.py commands, run

# ./manage.py help

If you run Pootle from an install (with setup.py or your operating system package) you will have to use the django-admin or django-admin.py command that comes with Django.

Here is the same example

# django-admin.py help --settings=pootle.settings

Note since django-admin.py is a global command it needs to know where to find Pootle via the --settings=pootle.settings command line option.

These commands will go through all existing projects performing maintenance tasks. The tasks are all available through the web interface but on a project by project or file by file basis.

All commands in that category accept a --directory command line option that expects a path relative to the po/ directory to limit it's action to.

Since Pootle 2.1.2 the commands target can be limited in a more flexible way using the --project --language command line options. they can be repeated to indicate multiple languages or projects. if you use both options together it will only match the files that match both languages and projects selected.

If you need to limit the commands to certain files or subdirectories you can use the --path-prefix option, path should be relative to project/language pair.

For example, to refresh_stats for the tutorial project only, run

./manage.py refresh_stats --project=tutorial

To only refresh a the Zulu and Basque language files within the tutorial project, run

./manage.py refresh_stats --project=tutorial --language=zu --language=eu

This command will go through all existing projects making sure calculated data is up to date. Running refresh_stats immediately after an install, upgrade or after adding large number of files will make Pootle feel faster as it will require less on-demand calculation of expensive statistics.

refresh_stats will do the following tasks:

• Update statistics cache (only useful if you are using memcached)
• Calculate quality checks so they appear on the translate page without the need to visit the review tab first
• Update full text search index (Lucene or Xapian)

This command will save all translations currently in database to the file system, thereby bringing the files under the po/ directory in sync with the Pootle database.

For better performance Pootle keeps translations in database and doesn't save them to disk except on demand (before file downloads and before major file level operations like version control update).

You must run this command before taking backups or running scripts that modify the translation files directly on the file system, otherwise you might miss out on translations that are in database but not yet saved to disk.

This command is the opposite of sync_stores. It will update the strings in database to reflect what is on disk, as Pootle will not detect changes in the file system on it's own.

It will also discover and import any new files added to existing languages within the projects.

You must run this command after running scripts that modify translation files directly on the file system.

update_stores has an extra command line option --keep that will prevent it from overwriting any existing translation in the database, thus only updating new translations and discovering new files and strings.

Note that if files on the file system are corrupt translations might be deleted from database. Handle with care!

This command is essentially an interface to the Translate Toolkit command pot2po with special Pootle specific routines to update database as well as file system to reflect the latest version of translation templates for each language in a project.

While updating existing files it will retain translations, and even do fuzzy matching in case strings had minor changes. New templates will initialize new untranslated files.

It is unlikely you will ever need to run this command for all projects at once. Use the --directory command line option to be specific about the project or project/language pair you want to target.

If the template files are corrupt translations might be lost. If you generate templates based on a script make sure they are in good shape.

This command scans project directories looking for files matching languages not added to the project then adds them. It basically repeats the discovery process done by Pootle when you create a new project.

Using the --cleanup command line option, languages added to projects that no longer have matching files on the filesystem will be deleted.

(Available since Pootle 2.2) This command updates the specified files from their version control system(s). It supports the parameters --directory, --project, and --language.

Pootle will take care to avoid version control conflicts, and will handle any conflicts on string level, just like it would if the update was done through the web front-end.

(Available since Pootle 2.2) This command commits the specified files to their version control system(s). It supports the parameters --directory, --project, and --language.

A file needs to be up to date, otherwise the commit will fail. Files can be updated inside Pootle, or using the update_from_vcs command. This is not done automatically, otherwise the merged version of the file will be committed without review without anybody knowing.

These commands expose the database installation and upgrade process from the command line.

Strictly speaking syncdb is a generic django ./manage.py command that creates empty database tables. It has been customized for Pootle to create everything required for a bare bones install. This includes database tables, default permissions, some default objects used internally by Pootle (like the “default” and “nobody” user profiles) and the special Terminology and Templates languages.

If you just run syncdb you will have a usable Pootle install but you will need to create all languages manually, and you will not have a tutorial project to play with.

Use this command if you plan to upgrade from a Pootle 1.2 install or if you don't like having many languages by default.

This is Pootle's install process, it creates the default admin user, populates the language table with several languages with their correct fields, initializes several terminology projects, and creates the tutorial project.

initdb can only be run after syncdb.

Note that initdb will not import translations in database, so the first visit to Pootle after initdb will be very slow. It is best to run refresh_stats immediately after initdb.

This is a command line interface to Pootle's database scheme upgrade process. Usually database upgrade is triggered automatically on the first visit to a new version of Pootle, but for very large installs database upgrades can be too slow for the browser and it is best to run updatedb from the command line.

./manage.py changepassword username

This creates a new admin user. It will prompt for username, password and email address.

This opens a database command prompt with the Pootle database already loaded. It is useful if you know SQL. Try not to break anything.

This opens a Python shell with the Django and Pootle environment already loaded. Useful if you know a bit of python or the Django models syntax.