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Set an UTF-8 locale as default, not POSIX

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#1,839 1 comment 2 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
55/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
docker
Domain
infrastructure

Research direction

Inspect how the Node image configures /etc/environment, then run the reported docker run --rm node:latest locale and locale -a commands to confirm the available locales. Set the default LC_CTYPE to C.UTF-8 and verify the wc -m Unicode example reports one character without passing an environment override.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Problem

The default locale of the node image is POSIX:

$ docker run --rm node:latest locale                                       
LANG=
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="POSIX"
LC_NUMERIC="POSIX"
LC_TIME="POSIX"
LC_COLLATE="POSIX"
LC_MONETARY="POSIX"
LC_MESSAGES="POSIX"
LC_PAPER="POSIX"
LC_NAME="POSIX"
LC_ADDRESS="POSIX"
LC_TELEPHONE="POSIX"
LC_MEASUREMENT="POSIX"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="POSIX"
LC_ALL=

node:19 has the following locales built-in:

$ docker run --rm node:19 locale -a
C
C.UTF-8
POSIX

The POSIX locale doesn't recognize UTF-8 (wc -m counts characters, not bytes).

$ docker run --rm node:latest bash -c 'echo -n 💩 | wc -m'
4
$ docker run --rm node:latest bash -c 'echo -n 💩 | LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 wc -m'
1

It is possible to manually enable C.UTF-8:

$ docker run --rm --env LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 node:latest bash -c 'echo -n 💩 | wc -m'
1

However in 2023, who doesn't need a locale supporting Unicode? ASCII is a bad default as it doesn't match a 2023 development environment.

Solution

Set LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 in the node image. Probably in file /etc/environment.

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