Django UnicodeDecodeError only on apache/nginx

Question

When

locale.getlocale()
locale.getdefaultlocale()
sys.getfilesystemencoding()
sys.getdefaultencoding()

is run through manage.py shell, I get

('en_US', 'UTF-8')
('en_US', 'UTF-8')
utf-8
utf-8

Which fits my locales:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US:
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

However, when the request is handled by Apache/Nginx it produces:

(None, None)
(None, None)
ascii
utf-8

This leads to several UnicodeDecodeErrors throughout my site and I failed to find the reason for the mismatch. Neither setting AddDefaultCharset utf-8 for Apache or charset utf-8; for Nginx solved the issue.

The webserver is run as a separate user. You'll have set that user's locale. A more robust approach would be not to rely on the locale anyway; declare encoding explicitly when opening files, de-/encoding streams etc. In each case ask yourself who should control the choice of encoding: the environment (possibly causing encoding errors at runtime if the environment's choices are unwise), or your interface? — lenz
– lenz, Commented Dec 16, 2017 at 19:23
I will try de-/encoding by hand. Still, Apache and Nginx are run by www-data, which has the same locales. — Bitbart
– Bitbart, Commented Dec 17, 2017 at 21:49
Sounds odd. I have to admit, though, that I don't understand every detail of how Python arrives at its default encodings for I/O. Which for me has been just another reason not to rely on them. — lenz
– lenz, Commented Dec 17, 2017 at 22:02

Bitbart · Accepted Answer · 2018-01-08 12:03:26Z

2

The solution was hidden in /etc/apache2/envvars:

## The locale used by some modules like mod_dav
export LANG=C
## Uncomment the following line to use the system default locale instead:
. /etc/default/locale

answered Jan 8, 2018 at 12:03

Bitbart

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