Hi everyone,

I've been building with TanStack Start and noticed there aren't many examples covering advanced i18n patterns—specifically localized URLs and proper international SEO.

I built a starter template that solves this using TanStack Router's rewrite option. Sharing here in case it's useful to others or worth adding to the examples.

The Problem

Most i18n setups force you into one of these patterns:

❌ Origin URL wasted (requires /en prefix for default language)
site.com/en/about
site.com/tr/about

❌ Same slugs for all languages (bad for SEO)
site.com/about
site.com/tr/about  ← "about" means nothing in Turkish

What we actually want:

✅ Origin URL used for default language
site.com/about        ← English (default)
site.com/tr/hakkimizda ← Turkish (localized slug)
site.com/fr/a-propos   ← French (localized slug)

The Solution: URL Rewriting

The router's rewrite option maps localized URLs to a single internal route structure:

Internal routes (your actual files):

routes/{-$locale}/about.tsx
routes/{-$locale}/products.$slug.tsx
routes/{-$locale}/products.search.tsx

What users see:

One route file serves all languages. No duplication, no custom Link wrappers needed.

Features

• Localized URLs with TanStack Router rewrite
• Origin URL support for default language (no /en prefix)
• Dynamic params preserved during rewrite ($slug, $id)
• SEO utilities — canonical links, hreflang tags, dynamic sitemap.xml
• Standard Link/Navigate — no custom wrappers required
• Code-first i18n extraction (optional) — AST-based tool that scans your code and generates translation JSON files

Repository

https://github.com/okanay/tanstack-i18n

If the team thinks this would be a useful addition to the examples directory, I'd be happy to open a PR.

Thanks for reading!