Accent CLI issues with sync and export commands

[AerunDev]

Context

• Project: video game using Accent self-hosted to translate game texts.
• Stack: VPS (Hostinger KVM4) → Portainer → Docker containers from the (accent_app, accent_db with PostgreSQL).
• Reverse proxy managed.
• Accent is running: the web UI is accessible and the accent stats command works correctly (API is reachable).

File organization

• Local repo (Git): texts are stored as CSV, converted to JSONs by language during CI/CD in a folder named output/json.

  • Example: output/json/en.json, output/json/fr.json, etc.

• On Accent (server): there is a single global document game_texts.json containing all languages.

Problem

• Running:

  accent sync --add-translations --merge-type=passive --config ./accent.json

• Current accent.json:

  {
    "files": [
      {
        "format": "json",
        "source": "./output/json/fr.json",
        "target": "./output/json_output/%slug%.json"
      }
    ]
  }

• CI/CD script for push_to_accent job:

# ============================
# 4️⃣ Push to Accent (manual)
# ============================
push_to_accent:
  stage: push_accent
  image: node:16
  script:
    - |
      if [ -z "$ACCENT_API_KEY" ] || [ -z "$ACCENT_API_URL" ]; then
        echo "[ERROR] ACCENT_API_KEY or ACCENT_API_URL not set. Aborting. ❌"
        exit 1
      fi
    - echo "[INFO] Checking if accent.json is present..."
    - if [ -f "./accent.json" ]; then echo "[INFO] accent.json found"; else echo "[ERROR] accent.json missing"; exit 1; fi
    - |
      if [ -d "./output/json" ] && [ "$(ls -A ./output/json)" ]; then
        echo "[INFO] JSON files to be pushed:"
        ls -la ./output/json
      else
        echo "[ERROR] No JSON files found in ./output/json to push!"
        exit 1
      fi
    - npm install -g accent-cli
    - echo "[INFO] Pushing JSON to Accent... ⬆️"
    - mkdir -p ./output/json_output
    - accent sync --add-translations --merge-type=passive --config ./accent.json
    - echo "[INFO] Push to Accent completed successfully ✅"
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - ./output/
    expire_in: 1 week
  needs:
    - job: csv_to_json
      artifacts: true
    - job: check_json_integrity
  rules:
    - when: manual

GitLab CI/CD variables ACCENT_API_KEY, ACCENT_API_URL & ACCENT_PROJECT have been set to prevent adding secrets on the repo.

Observed behavior:

• accent stats works (API OK ✅):

 ^  Game Texts  •  69.26% reviewed
⎯
Last synced
2025-09-14T13:10:57Z

Master language
French – fr

Translations (8)
Chinese Simplified – zh-Hans • 0% reviewed
English – en • 100% reviewed
German – de • 84.83% reviewed
Italian – it • 84.78% reviewed
Japanese – ja • 84.29% reviewed
Korean – ko • 84.24% reviewed
Portuguese, Brazilian – pt-BR • 0% reviewed
Spanish – es • 85.17% reviewed

Documents (1)
game_texts - JSON (No matches in config file)

• accent sync --add-translations --merge-type=passive --config ./accent.json returns error on the CI/CD:

Fetch config in ./accent.json... API Client ✓
Syncing sources → fr  ✓
 ›   Error: {"error":"Internal error","message":"An error occurred, someone has
 ›    been notified"}
Cleaning up project directory and file based variables
ERROR: Job failed: exit code 1

• accent export returns an error:

Fetch config in accent.json... API Client ✓

Writing files locally

   ↓ output/json_output/fr.json output/json → fr
 »   Error: Not found

• Logs show that fr.json is used as source, but Accent does not update the server-side document game_texts.json.

Hypothesis

• Accent might expect a configuration that matches the single global document game_texts.json stored on the server (field documents.path in the DB).
• The CLI documentation mentions a placeholder %document_path% for source/target, but it’s unclear how to use it when:
  • server side → one global document (game_texts.json)
  • local repo → multiple per-language files (fr.json, en.json, etc.).

Questions

• What is the correct accent.json configuration to map a single global document (game_texts.json) on the Accent server to multiple per-language files (fr.json, en.json, etc.) in the repo?
• Should %document_path% be used in target?
• Are there any known limitations when running Accent behind a reverse proxy (Nginx Proxy Manager)?
• Last bonus question, if I want to use my GitLab CI/CD to pull translations from accent, bring back each translation into the output/json_output/ folder as a single json file per language (i.e. fr.json), do I need to use a different config file or Accent is already able to do that using accent sync?

[AerunDev]

Small update! 🎉
After downgrading accent-cli to 0.15.0, accent export now works properly.
#429 gave me the idea. Ty.

v0.14.1 works too, but accent stats is buggy.

accent sync still returns this error:

Error: {"error":"Internal error","message":"An error occurred, someone has been notified"}