UnicodeEncodeError raised when 'createsuperuser' is called

Question

I am trying to deploy my Django application (2.1.5 with Python 3.6.6) on my server with a PostGreSQL database. I did a 'makemigrations' and 'migrate' as usual and then I can't create a super user with the command 'createsuperuser':

[alex@web574 myproject]$ python3.6 manage.py createsuperuser
Nom d'utilisateur (leave blank to use 'alex'): 
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "manage.py", line 15, in <module>
    execute_from_command_line(sys.argv)
  File "/home/alex/webapps/global_hse_project/lib/python3.6/Django-2.1.5-py3.6.egg/django/core/management/__init__.py", line 381, in execute_from_command_line
    utility.execute()
  File "/home/alex/webapps/global_hse_project/lib/python3.6/Django-2.1.5-py3.6.egg/django/core/management/__init__.py", line 375, in execute
    self.fetch_command(subcommand).run_from_argv(self.argv)
  File "/home/alex/webapps/global_hse_project/lib/python3.6/Django-2.1.5-py3.6.egg/django/core/management/base.py", line 316, in run_from_argv
    self.execute(*args, **cmd_options)
  File "/home/alex/webapps/global_hse_project/lib/python3.6/Django-2.1.5-py3.6.egg/django/contrib/auth/management/commands/createsuperuser.py", line 60, in execute
    return super().execute(*args, **options)
  File "/home/alex/webapps/global_hse_project/lib/python3.6/Django-2.1.5-py3.6.egg/django/core/management/base.py", line 353, in execute
    output = self.handle(*args, **options)
  File "/home/alex/webapps/global_hse_project/lib/python3.6/Django-2.1.5-py3.6.egg/django/contrib/auth/management/commands/createsuperuser.py", line 139, in handle
    input_value = self.get_input_data(field, message)
  File "/home/alex/webapps/global_hse_project/lib/python3.6/Django-2.1.5-py3.6.egg/django/contrib/auth/management/commands/createsuperuser.py", line 194, in get_input_data
    raw_value = input(message)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\xe9' in position 8: ordinal not in range(128)

I found on Google to add:

# -*- Coding: utf-8 -*-

at the top of the file but it doesn't work, same result with the variable DEFAULT_CHARSET (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/settings/#std:setting-DEFAULT_CHARSET). My PostGreSQL database are asking for utf-8 encoding.

Answer 1

This may be caused by the fact that encoding used for the stdin does not support the characters being typed in at the input() prompt.

You can try explicitly setting the encoding to UTF-8 using the PYTHONIOENCODING environment variable before you run the createsuperuser command:

export PYTHONIOENCODING="UTF-8"; python3.6 manage.py createsuperuser