Installation and first project

Glossa is a desktop application for consulting digitised sources and translating documents with language models. Its React frontend communicates with a Rust backend through Tauri, and working data is stored in a local SQLite database.

This documentation follows the main branch and may cover features newer than your installed release. See project status for the current beta limitations.

Installation

Download the package for your operating system from GitHub Releases. Distribution formats include Windows installers, macOS disk images, and AppImage, DEB and RPM packages for Linux. Check the assets attached to your chosen release.

Remote translation services require their own credentials. Local processing requires a running Ollama server and a downloaded model. Configure your connection under Settings → Provider.

Your first translation project

1. Create a workspace: a group of projects and shared resources.
2. Create a project in that workspace and import a document.
3. Check the extracted text and segment boundaries in the import preview.
4. Set the languages, pipeline mode, providers and models for the active stages.
5. Run a test on a representative segment and compare the result with the source.
6. Process the remaining segments, review the translations and export the document.

The translation guide explains execution and segment states. To work with digitised material, start with source search.

Running from source

Development requires Node.js ^20.19.0 or >=22.12.0, npm >=11, Rust and the Tauri system dependencies. Node.js and npm requirements are declared in package.json; system dependencies are listed in the README.

git clone https://github.com/nikazzio/glossa.git
cd glossa
npm install
npm run tauri:dev

tauri:dev starts both Vite and the desktop application. npm run tauri:build produces distribution packages using the release configuration.

Local documentation and deployment

npm run docs:start
npm run docs:build

The first command starts VitePress at 127.0.0.1:3001; the second generates the site in docs/.vitepress/dist. Italian content lives in docs/ and English content in docs/en/. Navigation and locales are configured in docs/.vitepress/config.ts.

The documentation workflow deploys to GitHub Pages after a push to main that changes a configured path, including docs/, the workflow itself or the npm manifests. Merges that do not affect those paths do not trigger deployment. Internal development notes live in docs-dev/.