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Fixing the locale issue in a clean DigitalOcean droplet

Posted on February 21, 2014

I’ve read numerous posts about people having problems with the default locale on a clean Digital Ocean droplet with Ubuntu. This manifests in getting errors like:

bash: warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale (en_US)

There is a quick fix, which is just running

locale-gen en_US

But. Can’t this be fixed in the default Ubuntu image? Apparently en_US is installed as the default locale, but the locale files aren’t generated. Am I thinking too simple? Are there any reasons why this can’t be included in the default image?

Thanks!



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It is now 2017 and this problem is still not fixed.

export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

Then run

sudo update-locale

Now run

locale

you shouldn’t see any errors.

For a permanent solution, Add the above export commands inside ~/.profile

I just had the same problem on a fresh droplet. The solution worked, however it’s a bit weird that the linux images are not preconfigured correctly with working locale settings.

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