Apertium-apy/Debian

This is a quickstart guide to setting up your very own Apertium API server on Debian-based systems (including Ubuntu).

Why?

Running your own API server means

• you get to decide what kinds of crazy half-finished language pairs to serve (or you can just serve a few of the high-quality ones that you like)
• you can run Apertium within your super-fortified network without your highly confidential translations touching anyone else's computer
• you don't have to worry about anyone else's API server going down right when you need it the most
• you have control over how many concurrent apertium processes you run (if your site or program calls plain `apertium` on each request, you can easily overload your server)

Quickstart

Install apt-repo and APY:

wget http://apertium.projectjj.com/apt/install-nightly.sh
sudo bash install-nightly.sh
sudo apt-get install apertium-apy

And install the language pairs you want:

sudo apt-get install apertium-eng-kaz apertium-sme-nob apertium-hbs-mkd apertium-eo-en apertium-tat-rus # etc.

(Here we're assuming you only want packaged pairs, see Installation on how to install SVN pairs.)

Now try starting APY and checking its status:

sudo systemctl start apertium-apy

sudo systemctl status apertium-apy

It should look like

Press q to get your terminal back.

Testing it out

Open a new terminal to check that it's OK:

curl http://localhost:2737/listPairs

It should contain a list of pairs.

Say the list contains {"sourceLanguage": "sme", "targetLanguage": "nob"}, then we can try translating the sentence "in leat doppe" from sme to nob:

curl 'http://localhost:2737/translate?langpair=sme|nob&q=in+leat+doppe'

That should give something like {"responseData": {"translatedText": "jeg er ikke der borte"}, "responseDetails": null, "responseStatus": 200} .

If everything worked, congrats, you have your own Apertium API server running! You can enable it on startup with

sudo systemctl enable apertium-apy

Now open port 2737 in your firewall and point your website or app at it :-)

If you ran into trouble, please ask for help on IRC or the mailing list.

Run on init

There are example init scripts in apertium-apy/tools/{systemd,upstart,sysvinit}; if you're running a fairly recent Ubuntu (15.04 or newer) or Debian (jessie or newer), then you should follow the instructions from apertium-apy/tools/systemd/README.

More info

See Apertium-apy for other things you can do with Apy and more documentation.