# ERROR: Ansible could not initialize the preferred locale

[jsanc525]

When trying to run ansible-playbooks from the tdp-dev node the error Ansible could not initialize the preferred locale is encountered.

CAUSE:

since ansible 2.14.0 ansible-core requires the locale to have UTF-8 encoding. Excerpt from the 2.14.0 release notes¹

ansible - At startup the filesystem encoding and locale are checked to verify they are UTF-8. If not, the process exits with an error reporting the errant encoding.

PROPOSED SOLUTIONS:

• The install guide could be updated to alert users they need to install glibc-all-langpacks or run export LC_ALL="C.UTF-8 on the tdp-dev node.
• Update so that glibc-all-langpacks is installed on the tdp-dev node.

Footnotes

1. https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/7bb078bd740fba8ad43cc69e18fc8aeb4719180a/changelogs/CHANGELOG-v2.14.rst#id11 ↩