Ansible: resolving ‘could not initialize the preferred locale: unsupported locale setting’

If you are getting the following error when invoking ‘ansible’, ‘ansible-playbook’, ‘ansible-galaxy’ or any of the Ansible related utilities:

ERROR: Ansible could not initialize the preferred locale: unsupported locale setting

This means Ansible cannot find a locale ending in “.UTF-8”. Check the currently installed locales:

$ locale -a

Then export the LC_ALL variable to one of the locales ending in UTF-8

export LC_ALL=C.UTF-8

# ansible should work now
ansible --version

As a permanent fix look at: installing locales, regenerating with “dpkg-reconfigure locales“, and setting the value in “/etc/default/locale”

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