i18n doesn't work at production environment on heroku

Question

I have seen more than one hundred posts about i18n issues and no solution seems to solve my problem.

I have an app running with Django 1.3.1 and it works Fine at my

Answer 1

I've found different platforms prefer different language folder names. I was pulling my hair out on my development system (Mac OS X) because '/pt-br/LC_MESSAGES/' wouldn't work, even though makemessages created the folders that way and compile messages worked fine too. It finally sprang to life once I renamed the languages as '/pt_br/LC_MESSAGES/' (notice the underscore).

Migrating the same project to production (Ubuntu), it stopped working again, I tried everything under the Sun thinking the folder names must already be correct since they work on my dev. machine. I finally, out of desperation tried uppercasing the country component like '/pt_BR/LC_MESSAGES/', and, boom, it started working again.

Even thought my Python and Django and all of my various Python/Django libraries and apps were (by design) identical versions, I suspect that each system has different versions/builds of gettext beneath them, which is likely responsible for the differences.