Foreword

What is Pontoon?

From Pontoon’s repository:

Pontoon is a translation management system used and developed by the Mozilla localization community. It specializes in open source localization that is driven by the community and uses version-control systems for storing translations.

Official Pontoon repository on Github:

Official Pontoon documentation:

Pontoon instance used to translate Firefox and other Mozilla’s projects:

What is Pontoon Debian?

Pontoon Debian is a project providing :

  • A Pontoon distribution to help install it on Debian and Ubuntu systems. It consists of:

    • Releases: Pontoon is a project in constant evolution that is deployed using continuous integration on Mozilla’s Heroku servers. This makes it difficult to maintain on a self-hosted server, so we chose to make releases with a defined set of new features / fixes in them, and to document the migration between two versions of our releases.

    • Prebuit tarballs: Pontoon versions that we build and release on a regular basis.

    • Build scripts: The scripts to build your own Pontoon versions.

    • Sample configuration files for Pontoon, systemd, Nginx,…

  • A manual (the one you are reading) to help administrators to install and maintain Pontoon on Debian and Ubuntu.

Each Pontoon version we release are automatically tested on a matrix of different distributions, Python and PostgreSQL versions (see below).

Targeted Systems

Pontoon Debian currently targets the following systems:

Distribution

Python

PostgreSQL

Distribution End of Support

Debian 11 (bullseye)

3.9

13

→ 2026-06

Debian 12 (bookworm)

3.11

15

→ 2028-06

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (jammy)

3.10

14

→ 2027-04

Warning

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (focal) is not supported anymore: some Python packages used by Pontoon now require Python >= 3.9.

Note

Please note that the “end of support” date is the end of the Linux distribution support, not the date until when Pontoon will be maintained on this system: if Pontoon’s developers stop supporting Python or PostgreSQL versions available on those platforms, the support will be dropped for newer releases.

Warranty

We made this project for our own needs and we shared it in the hope that it will be useful. It is provided “as is”, without any warranty. We are not liable to you for any damage or data loss you encounter by following the instructions of this manual or by using our scripts and releases.

Also please note that we may stop working on this project at any time, and that we may not answer support requests.