I was setting up the python.org website code, built on Django, on my local machine I encountered the error ValueError: unknown locale: UTF-8 while running the ./manage.py migrate command. See screenshot below: Screenshot 2020-05-06 at 01.06.57 To fix this, I had to set the following environment variables: export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 export LANG=en_US.UTF-8 There, back to code.