Cannot install pip packages due to locale.error inside Ubuntu Vagrant Box

Question

I just created a vagrant box with ubuntu/trusty32. The vagrant provisioner, during box creation time, has done the following:

• downloaded python virtualenv source tarball using wget
• untarred the virtualenv source tarball using tar zxvf ./virtualenv.tar.gz
• created a virtualenv called venv using python ./virtualenv/virtualenv.py ./venv
• sourced the newly created venv with source ./venv/bin/activate
• installed a few pip packages with pip install django, pip install mysqlclient etc inside the virtual environment.

All of this worked fine and perfect - executed by the vagrant provisioner when the vagrant box was being created for the first time.

However, later on, i logged in to the vagrant ssh and tried to install ipython via pip.

$ vagrant ssh
vagrant@django-box:~$ source venv/bin/activate
(venv) vagrant@django-box:~$ pip install ipython
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/vagrant/venv/bin/pip", line 11, in <module>
    sys.exit(main())
  File "/home/vagrant/venv/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/__init__.py", line 215, in main
    locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '')
  File "/home/vagrant/venv/lib/python2.7/locale.py", line 579, in setlocale
    return _setlocale(category, locale)
locale.Error: unsupported locale setting
(venv) vagrant@django-box:~$ 

Note: this is a fresh new vagrant box running ubuntu/trusty32 out of the box.

There are several SO questions about locale error but following them revealed no help for this vagrant scenario.

It doesn't make sense that all of it worked perfectly fine during vagrant box creation/provision time but not working afterwards when trying the same thing manually.

Answer 1

First check your current locale config by simply putting locale in command line.

You should see something similar to:

locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
LANG=C
LC_CTYPE=utf8

Set a valid locale in the LC_CTYPE environment variable by running the following commands:

export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
export LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

PS. en_US.UTF-8 is used here but if you need to check all available locales on your system, run the command locale -a

This should solve the problem.