Language & Locale Configuration

By default the BookStack interface is shown in English. Additional languages are supported by the wider BookStack community. English translations may show as a fallback if a chosen alternative language does not have fully up-to-date translations.

Setting the Default Language

The value of the APP_LANG variable needs to be a valid locale code The default language will be used as the default for logged-in users and also for public users if their language cannot be auto-detected. This can be set in your .env file as follows:

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# Sets application language to French
APP_LANG=fr

The value of the APP_LANG variable must be a valid locale code matching one of the following options:

Public User Locale Autodetection

For users that are not logged-in BookStack will try to detect their language based upon information sent from their browser. If you’d prefer to disable this functionality, and instead just use the APP_LANG setting, you can set the following in your .env file:

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APP_AUTO_LANG_PUBLIC=false

Localised Date Formatting

BookStack does support the localisation of date formats but it depends on the intended locales being installed on the host system. If using Ubuntu, you can manage installed locales via the command:

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sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

For other operating systems this may be different. After installing new locales you may need to restart any running PHP processes. For example, on Ubuntu, running PHP 8.4:

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sudo systemctl restart php8.4-fpm.service 

Time-zones

By default BookStack will store date-times in the database as UTC. Leaving this as the default is advised to keep these stable across potential time-zone changes, but if needed this can be changed by setting an APP_TIMEZONE option in your .env configuration:

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APP_TIMEZONE=Europe/Berlin

In most scenarios, BookStack will show date-times in the UI using a relative format (eg. 3 hours ago) for which time-zones don’t matter, but in some contexts (such as when hovering over many of these relative times) BookStack will show the absolute date-time. The time-zone used for these will default to the value of APP_TIMEZONE as configured above, but you can configure these absolute date-times shown to use a different time-zone by setting a APP_DISPLAY_TIMEZONE option in your .env configuration:

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APP_DISPLAY_TIMEZONE=America/Los_Angeles

The time-zone values accepted in these options follow those used by PHP, a list of which can be found here.