Crowdin CLI 5.0 - try it and share feedback

[andrii-bodnar]

Tip

UPD: CLI v5 is now live as the latest release. Read the announcement ✨ , and share your feedback! 💬

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Hi everyone,

We've published the pre-release of Crowdin CLI 5.0, and we'd like your feedback before the stable release.

v5 is a full rewrite of the CLI, from Java to TypeScript, powered by Bun. It ships as a single self-contained native binary - no Java or JRE to install - and starts almost instantly, which is especially noticeable in CI. The command structure, crowdin.yml configuration, and exit codes stay the same, so most workflows carry over unchanged.

What's new in 5.0

• Machine-readable output via the global -o, --output option: json, toon (compact, LLM-friendly), and plain
• A refreshed interactive experience (init, select menus, spinners, graceful cancellation)
• More control over auto-translation
• Stable cached uploads (upload sources --cache is no longer experimental)
• Better shell autocompletion
• ~90% test coverage

For the full list, see the release highlights.

Try it

npm install -g @crowdin/cli@next

The binary matching your platform is installed automatically (macOS arm64/x64, Linux x64/arm64 with glibc & musl, Windows x64).

The pre-release also ships as a Docker image and a GitHub Action:

• Docker - pull the next tag: docker pull crowdin/cli:next (latest stays on 4.x)
• GitHub Action - the v3 pre-release runs on CLI 5: uses: crowdin/github-action@v3.0.0-next.1

What we're looking for

• Does it work in your setup - local, CI, and across platforms?
• Anything that behaved differently from v4?
• How's the new output / interactive experience?

This is a pre-release, so expect the occasional rough edge. Reply here with anything you find - thanks for helping us get 5.0 right.

[toblu]

Hello! Just wanted to feedback that the --format flag for crowdin context download command has been removed in v5, but I couldn't see it mentioned in the release notes. Makes sense it was removed since it only supported jsonl anyway, but would be good to include in the release notes since it's a breaking change. Really enjoying the speed up of the CLI in v5 by the way 🚀

[andrii-bodnar]

Thanks a lot for the feedback, @toblu! 🤩

Indeed, we removed this option because there was only one possible value, and it doesn't seem that we need more values yet. However, we forgot to mention this in the release notes, thank you!

[joonass-visma]

Hello! We are trying to upload our translation source file to Crowdin but noticed that preserve_hierarchy option seems to be bugged somehow in v5 in a case where we don't want the Crowdin source structure to match the repository.

Our crowdin.yml looks like this:

project_id_env: CROWDIN_PROJECT_ID
api_token_env: CROWDIN_PERSONAL_TOKEN

# Flatten the structure so translation.json lands at the Crowdin project root.
preserve_hierarchy: false

files:
    - source: /public/locales/en/translation.json
      translation: /public/locales/%two_letters_code%/%original_file_name%

When uploading sources with crowdin/github-action@v2, dry-run says it is gonna create file to ./translation.json which is what we want.

However, when uploading sources with crowdin/github-action@v3, dry-run says it is gonna create file to ./public/locales/en/translation.json, which matches our GitHub repo structure, but is not what we want.

[andrii-bodnar]

Hello @joonass-visma, thanks for the feedback! Looking into this

[joonass-visma]

@andrii-bodnar Seems like dry-run just reports the destination wrong. It says "File 'public/locales/en/translation.json' would be created" which is misleading. Actual upload seems to land at the Crowdin project root like we want.

[andrii-bodnar]

PR with the fix: #1097

[andrii-bodnar]

@joonass-visma the fix is available in the latest CLI (v5.0.2) and GitHub action (v3 and v3.0.2).