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 60 available locales.

For example, you can import the German locale:

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

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 { base, de, de_CH, en, Faker } 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';

Locale codes ​

Locales are named in a systematic way. The first two characters are a lowercase language code following the ISO 639-1 standard for example ar for Arabic or en for English.

The same language may be spoken in different countries, with different patterns for addresses, phone numbers etc. Optionally a two-letter uppercase country code can be added after an underscore, following the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 standard, for example en_US represents English (United States) and en_AU represents English (Australia).

Rarely, an additional variant may be needed to fully represent an accented variant of the locale, or for languages which can be written in different scripts. This is appended after another underscore, for example en_AU_ocker (English in Australia in "Ocker" dialect) or sr_RS_latin (Serbian in Serbia in Latin script).

The recommended way to access Faker instances is by using one of the individual imports as shown above. If needed you can access all prebuilt Faker instances or all locale definitions via an object where the locale codes are the keys:

import { allFakers, allLocales } from '@faker-js/faker';

console.dir(allFakers['de_AT']); // the prebuilt Faker instance for de_AT
console.dir(allLocales['de_AT']); // the raw locale definitions for de_AT

This could be useful if you want to enumerate all locales, for example:

import { allFakers } from '@faker-js/faker';

for (let key of Object.keys(allFakers)) {
  try {
    console.log(
      `In locale ${key}, a sample name is ${allFakers[key].person.fullName()}`
    );
  } catch (e) {
    console.log(`In locale ${key}, an error occurred: ${e}`);
  }
}