Confluence Server 6.8 on Linux: "invalid locale name" on PostgreSQL 9.6

[James Harris]

Server: Ubuntu 18.04 Desktop 64-bit

In the Atlassian Instructions:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/conf68/database-setup-for-postgresql-947171095.html

I am trying to follow the step:

2. Next, create a database (for example confluence): 

• Owner is your new database user (for example confluenceuser)
• Character encoding must be set to utf8 encoding.
• Collation must also be set to utf8.  Other collations, such as "C", are known to cause issues with Confluence. 

These are my commands and results:

sudo -u postgres psql

postgres=# \c
You are now connected to database "postgres" as user "postgres".
postgres-# \du
List of roles
Role name          | Attribute                                                                                               | Member of
------------------------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----------
confluenceuser | Superuser, Create role, Create DB                                                 | {}
postgres              | Superuser, Create role, Create DB, Replication, Bypass RLS | {}

postgres=# create database test1 owner=confluenceuser encoding=utf8 lc_collate=utf8;
ERROR: invalid locale name: "utf8"

I have Googled for several hours on this, and found only one possible cause and no solutions.

Possible cause: There is no file /etc/locale.conf, even though I ran:

root@JGist-Server-1:/etc# locale-gen
Generating locales (this might take a while)...
en_AG.UTF-8... done
...
en_US.UTF-8... done
en_ZA.UTF-8... done
en_ZM.UTF-8... done
en_ZW.UTF-8... done
Generation complete.
root@JGist-Server-1:/etc#

At any rate, it seems there are no possible candidates in the "supported locales" documentation that are anything like a simple "utf8" (or UTF8, UTF-8, etc.); all have language and country codes, like en_US.UTF-8 as seen above.

It seems to me there is something missing from the Instructions page linked above.

Please help.

[Gonchik Tsymzhitov]

Hi James, 

1. In your command looks like you need also dpkg-reconfigure locales.

2. Regarding related locale in DBMS, in my experience, I use the ru_RU.utf-8 like this 

 ENCODING 'UTF8' LC_COLLATE = 'ru_RU.UTF-8' LC_CTYPE = 'ru_RU.UTF-8';

Hence don't afraid, let's set the en_US.UTF-8 locale for the LC_COLLATE.

Cheers,

Gonchik Tsymzhitov 

[James Harris]

I had already tried en_US.UTF-8 and it didn’t work either;  I think it generated a syntax error with the arrow pointing at the hyphen as the cause of the syntax error.