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I try to install mongo using mongo documentation: Install MongoDB on Ubuntu no errors were mentioned during the installation. But when I run the mongo command following error was displayed in the terminal.

Failed global initialization: BadValue Invalid or no user locale set. Please ensure LANG and/or LC_* environment variables are set correctly

P.-H. Lin
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Gayan Charith
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4 Answers4

89

Looks like your locale settings are broken or non-existent on that VM, or at least that session on that VM. One of MongoDB's dependencies (boost) will fail when a locale is not correctly set (see SERVER-9032). For reference, before the change in SERVER-9032 this problem still happened but looked like this.

Sometimes logging out and back in can fix it (only broken for current session), or you can try running sudo locale-gen to make sure generation is successful.

In the meantime, as a workaround to get mongo (or mongod etc.) running, just set your LC_ALL variable manually before starting the program:

export LC_ALL=C
mongo
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Adam C
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15

I also tried installing MongoDB on Ubuntu 12.04 and got the same error on a virtual machine (XEN). For me, modifiying /etc/default/locale did the trick. I got it working with these settings:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

Or, another working config would be (mind the quotes and the :en):

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LANGUAGE="en_US:en"
LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"

Adam C's workaround with export also helped and is probably the more elaborate answer.

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LeBird
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4

Though the other answers provided here solve the problem correctly the following Stackoverflow question brought me to what the actual issue is when having MongoDB installed in a Vagrant VM and getting the above error:

This problem appears because host machine put locale to guest via ssh.

Thus the answer suggesting to override the host locale within the Vagrantfile solves it permanently with just a line:

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|

    ENV['LC_ALL']="en_US.UTF-8"

    # ...

end

Also note the comments about that it does not modify the actual LC_ALL value on the host.

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conceptdeluxe
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1

Based on this https://askubuntu.com/a/227513/59618 you can just:

$ sudo locale-gen "en_US.UTF-8"
Generating locales...
  en_US.UTF-8... done
Generation complete.

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
Generating locales...
  en_US.UTF-8... up-to-date
Generation complete.
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psychok7
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