How to support routes with and without locale prefix in Fresh 2 without duplicating files?

[marvinhagemeister]

Discussed in #3501

^{Originally posted by s00d September 27, 2025}
Hi!

I’m trying to implement i18n in Fresh 2.
The goal is to support URLs both with locale prefix and without it, e.g.:

• /aaa
• /de/aaa
• /ru/blog/some-post

I want both variants to resolve to the same route file (e.g. routes/aaa.tsx or routes/blog/[slug].tsx) without duplicating files under each locale folder.

I tried using middleware:

• It correctly detects the locale from the first URL segment.
• But ctx.next() still resolves against the original URL (/de/aaa) → Fresh looks for routes/de/aaa.tsx (which doesn’t exist) → 404.
• Fresh doesn’t allow passing a modified Request to ctx.next(), so I cannot “rewrite” the path like in Next.js.

Questions:

• Is there an official / recommended way in Fresh 2 to handle this use case?
• Does the team plan to support some form of URL rewriting in middleware (so /de/aaa can transparently resolve to routes/aaa.tsx)?

Thanks in advance!