Fabric how to set environment variable to fix encoding

Hi there,

Today I've encountered with one weird problem and decided to share it with you.

Here is what happens. When I ssh to server manually and run python script - everything works fine. But if I try to run the same script using fabric script, which connects to the same server, then it fails. In particular, it was encoding error:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xaa' in position bb: ordinal not in range(128)

Then I dug a bit into the problem and decided to print system encoding from python script:

import sys
print sys.getfilesystemencoding()

When I ran it manually from the shell the output was "en_US.utf8", but when I ran the same using fabric it was: "ANSI_X3.4-1968".

OK gotcha. In addition to that locale environment variables were not set when running python script with fabric. So in the end I decided to set LC_CTYPE environment variable in fabric, which in turn fixed the problem.

To set LC_CTYPE or any other environment variable in fabric, whether you're using new-style tasks or basic tasks, you can use this code:

from fabric.api import env
env.command_prefixes=["export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8",]

This worked well for me. But if you know a better approach how to set environment variable globally in fabric, please do let me know.