Localization ​

Switching locales ​

Did you know Faker supports many different locales?
When using our default instance import { faker } from '@faker-js/faker' you get English data. However, we also provide pre-built instances for more than 50 other locales.

import { fakerDE as faker } from '@faker-js/faker'

See below for a list of available locales.

Individual localized packages ​

Currently, the imports from the main package have a bug and always cause the entire Faker lib to be imported. This might result in loading around 5 MB of data into memory and slow down startup times.

But we got your back!
When encountering such a problem in a test or production environment, you can use the individual localized packages.

import { faker } from '@faker-js/faker/locale/de';

This will then just load the German locales with additional English locales as fallback. The fallback is required due to not all locales containing data for all features. If you encounter a missing locale entry in your selected language, feel free to open a Pull Request fixing that issue.

Custom locales and fallbacks ​

If our built-in faker instances don't satisfy your needs, you can build your own:

import type { LocaleDefinition } from '@faker-js/faker';
import { Faker, de_CH, de, en, base } from '@faker-js/faker';

const customLocale: LocaleDefinition = {
  title: 'My custom locale',
  internet: {
    domainSuffix: ['test'],
  },
};

export const customFaker = new Faker({
  locale: [customLocale, de_CH, de, en, base],
});

In this example there are 5 locales. Each of these is checked in order, and the first locale which contains the requested data will be used:

• customLocale is your custom locale definition which will override all other fallback definitions.
• de_CH is a specific locale definition that overrides some German definitions with CH (Switzerland) data.
• de is a generic de (German) locale definition.
• en is a generic en (English) locale definition. This is our most complete locale, so we add it to fill some gaps. Depending on your needs, you might want or not want to have it as a fallback.
• base is the base locale definition which contains definitions that can be used in every language (e.g. emojis).

Available locales ​

The Locale (data) and Faker columns refer to the respective import names:

import { de, fakerDE } from '@faker-js/faker';