Ubuntu Locale Error

I have pretty much always had locale errors on my Ubuntu servers.  I figured it was probably due to having it set for US English with a Japanese keyboard or something.  Well, I finally got around to fixing the problem.

Here are the errors I was getting:

perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale (“C”).
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory

Here is how I fixed it:

sudo nano /etc/default/locale

Add the following line:

LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

 I’m using en_US so this is what I used.  Match yours to the results you get with a “locale” command

Then run:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

The above may not actually be required.  But finish up with a restart:

sudo shutdown -r now

That fixed both my home server and the Moodle server I run at work. (Both running Ubuntu 14.04)