Installation instructions should ensure that the terminal preferred encoding is UTF8

[giovannipizzi]

Otherwise packages (e.g. click-spinner would fail), because open() will try to open with the default locale (often ASCII), see here.

This can be fixed by setting the locale to UTF-8, e.g. by running:

export LANG=UTF-8
export LC_ALL=UTF-8

(probably only the second one is needed).

Better to put this in the ~/.bashrc or at least in the bin/activate of the venv so that it works in all terminals.

[ltalirz]

Consider placing it in the .bashrc in your home directory

[Lokeshranjan8]

Hi @ltalirz
I'm working on setting up the environment for this project and ran into a problem with terminal locale settings. I tried adding the following to my .bashrc
////////////

Set UTF-8 encoding

export LANG=UTF-8
export LC_ALL=UTF-8
////////////
but getting this --sudo update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
bash: warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale (UTF-8)
[sudo] password for aiida:

[ltalirz]

Hey @Lokeshranjan8 , after having a quick look into it, I actually don't think UTF-8 is a valid locale.
It should probably be something like en_US.UTF-8.

You can list the locales available on your system with locale -a.
If en_US.UTF-8 is not available, you can generate it using something like

sudo locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

(depending on your OS)

[Balamurugan-1]

Hey @giovannipizzi, is this issue still open? If yes, I’d be happy to take it up as a good first issue and update the installation documentation.

[giovannipizzi]

I don't know - probably yes, but it would be good to check (e.g. try to use AiiDA in a terminal without the encodings set up correctly).
It's possible that this does not apply anymore, I tried to set an empty locale on my Mac with

export LC_ALL=
export LANG=

and verdi still works. If you manage to reproduce this, please report how, and then good to make a PR. Otherwise, I would close this issue.