Unicodedecodeerror with runserver

Question

After setting up all what django requires, I tried the runserver command and I caught an error:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xcf in position 8: invalid continuation byte

From:

c:\sue>python manage.py runserver
Validating models...

0 errors found
April 16, 2014 - 15:02:42
Django version 1.6.2, using settings 'sue.settings'
Starting development server at http://127.0.0.1:8000/
Quit the server with CTRL-BREAK.
Unhandled exception in thread started by <function check_errors.<locals>.wrapper at 0x0000000003890048>
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\python34\lib\site-packages\django\utils\autoreload.py", line 93, in wrapper fn(*args, **kwargs)
  File "C:\python34\lib\site-packages\django\core\management\commands\runserver.py", line 127, in inner_run ipv6=self.use_ipv6, threading=threading)
  File "C:\python34\lib\site-packages\django\core\servers\basehttp.py", line 167, in run httpd = httpd_cls(server_address, WSGIRequestHandler, ipv6=ipv6)
  File "C:\python34\lib\site-packages\django\core\servers\basehttp.py", line 109, in __init__ super(WSGIServer, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
  File "C:\python34\lib\socketserver.py", line 430, in __init__ self.server_bind()
  File "C:\python34\lib\site-packages\django\core\servers\basehttp.py", line 113, in server_bind super(WSGIServer, self).server_bind()
  File "C:\python34\lib\wsgiref\simple_server.py", line 50, in server_bind HTTPServer.server_bind(self)
  File "C:\python34\lib\http\server.py", line 137, in server_bind
    self.server_name = socket.getfqdn(host)
  File "C:\python34\lib\socket.py", line 460, in getfqdn
    hostname, aliases, ipaddrs = gethostbyaddr(name)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xcf in position 8: invalid continuation byte

I am using Windows 7 x64, python 3.4 and django 1.6.2. What does this error mean?

Answer 1

This sounds like this Python issue. If your computer name has non-ASCII characters this will fail. You may:

1. Issue the runserver command with explicit host and port: python manage.py runserver 127.0.0.1:8000
2. Change your computer name to a string that only contains ASCII characters.

Answer 2

I just had this issue because I accidentally visited the site with https instead of http. Switching back to http fixed it.