Cloud: Postgres fails to initialize in DB VM when using non-en_US locale.

[iedemam]

On both Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04, the DB VM fails to complete its "Add all the packages needed for operation" playbook task if the host locale is not set to en_US. In my case, Ubuntu had automagically set my locale to es_ES based on my timezone during installation. The error reported is:

Adding user postgres to group ssl-cert

Creating config file /etc/logrotate.d/postgresql-common with new version
Building PostgreSQL dictionaries from installed myspell/hunspell packages...
Removing obsolete dictionary files:
 * No PostgreSQL clusters exist; see \"man pg_createcluster\"
Error: The locale requested by the environment is invalid.
Error: could not create default cluster. Please create it manually with

  pg_createcluster 9.3 main --start

or a similar command (see 'man pg_createcluster').

This is because remote sessions using non-en_US locales fail to set the LANGUAGE environment variable properly. An article referencing the problem can be found here: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/language-problem-on-ubuntu-14-04

After setting my locale back to en_US in all aspects (date, time, numeric, etc), the LANGUAGE environment variable was set properly again and postgres installed successfully.

A fix would be to hardcode the locale environment variables into the playbook. If that is an acceptable solution, I will prepare a PR. A workaround is having a proper LANGUAGE variable defined in your .bash_profile.

Last tested on 3e9b52b082ad602fdcab5cc05643b022a7655f2f.

[9muir]

Thanks for reporting. I think hardcoding the env vars seems reasonable, I don't think we will need to support non-US locales in the BTS. If you can prepare a PR that would be great.

[iedemam]

Roger. Will do.

[9muir]

closed by #7