Be part of JetBrains PHPverse 2026 on June 9 – a free online event bringing PHP devs worldwide together.
I created a clean Laravel 9 project
In the docs, in the directory structure page, it shows lang is in the root:
https://laravel.com/docs/9.x/structure
But I just tested localization and by default (at least on Laravel 9), it worked only when I put the lang directory inside resources.
It didn't work when I put it in the root of the project
If you check this, you can see it's correct https://github.com/laravel/laravel
But it works in both places. It was moved recently so there is still support for the old location. The problem might have been that you had an empty lang folder in resources
@Sinnbeck I just re-checked, I had no empty lang in resources - I added it (after the default location in the root didn't work).
Now I deleted the one in resources, added it back to the root. cleared all caches (optimize:clear), and it stopped working.
I then moved the folder back to resources and it worked again
@Ligonsker try composer update
Maybe you are running an old version
@Sinnbeck I created a clean project (9.3) I'll try again
@ligonsker as you can see in laravel source code https://github.com/laravel/framework/blob/9.x/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Application.php#L326
firstly it checks that lang in resource path is dir, and if yes - use it
if no - use lang dir in root path
So, removing lang dir in the resource make the app to use lang dir in the root
Please or to participate in this conversation.