django makemessages does nothing

Question

When I run django-admin makemessages -l en nothing happens and no po files are created. It only says processing locale en

This is my folder structure

/myproject
 myapp/
 locale/
 media/
 static/
 templates/
 db.sqlite
 manage.py
 settings.py
 urls.py
 wsgi.py

settings.py

import os
BASE_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__))
INSTALLED_APPS = [
 'django.contrib.admin',
 'django.contrib.auth',
 'django.contrib.contenttypes',
 'django.contrib.sessions',
 'django.contrib.messages',
 'django.contrib.staticfiles',
 'myapp',
]
MIDDLEWARE = [
 'django.middleware.security.SecurityMiddleware',
 'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
 'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware',
 'django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware',
 'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',
 'django.contrib.messages.middleware.MessageMiddleware',
 'django.middleware.clickjacking.XFrameOptionsMiddleware',
 'django_user_agents.middleware.UserAgentMiddleware',
]
ROOT_URLCONF = 'urls'
WSGI_APPLICATION = 'wsgi.application'
LANGUAGE_CODE = 'fr'
TIME_ZONE = 'UTC'
USE_I18N = True
USE_L10N = True
USE_TZ = True
LOCALE_PATHS = [os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'locale')]

Answer 1

I realized that makemessages does not create po files if translations are not referenced in any of the templates

I was expecting makemessages to create an empty po file that can I continue editing, but it does not work that way. At least one of the templates must have translations for the file to be created at the first time.

{% load i18n %}
....
{% trans 'Welcome' %}

python manage.py makemessages -l en

# SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE.
# Copyright (C) YEAR THE PACKAGE'S COPYRIGHT HOLDER
# This file is distributed under the same license as the PACKAGE package.
# FIRST AUTHOR <EMAIL@ADDRESS>, YEAR.
#
#, fuzzy
msgid ""
msgstr ""
"Project-Id-Version: PACKAGE VERSION\n"
"Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: \n"
"POT-Creation-Date: 2020年11月08日 18:58+0100\n"
"PO-Revision-Date: YEAR-MO-DA HO:MI+ZONE\n"
"Last-Translator: FULL NAME <EMAIL@ADDRESS>\n"
"Language-Team: LANGUAGE <[email protected]>\n"
"Language: \n"
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"
"Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=(n != 1);\n"
#: .\templates\index.html:4
msgid "Welcome"
msgstr ""

I hope this will be useful to anyone encountering the same issue

Answer 2

You should probably add your app as ‘myapp.apps.MyappConfig’ instead of just ‘myapp’ in your settings.py INSTALLED_APPS and also include your app in LOCALE_PATHS

LOCALE_PATHS = ( 
os.path.join(BASE_DIR, "locale"),
os.path.join(BASE_DIR, "yourapp/locale"), 

)