How to set the locale inside a Debian/Ubuntu Docker container?

docker ubuntu debian
mtmacdonald picture mtmacdonald · Feb 9, 2015 · Viewed 112.9k times · Source

I'm running a Ubuntu Docker container. I have a Norwegian keyboard and need to use Norwegian characters (øæå).

My Terminal character encoding is set to UTF-8 and I'm connected to my container using SSH. However, I'm unable to type Norwegian characters, nor copy and paste Norwegian characters, nor use CTL+SHIFT+U+00f8.

I tried:

locale-gen nb_NO.UTF-8

but nothing changed. How do I set the locale and keyboard inside a Docker container?

Answer

user2915097 picture user2915097 · Feb 9, 2015

Put in your Dockerfile something adapted from

# Set the locale
RUN sed -i '/en_US.UTF-8/s/^# //g' /etc/locale.gen && \
    locale-gen
ENV LANG en_US.UTF-8  
ENV LANGUAGE en_US:en  
ENV LC_ALL en_US.UTF-8

If you run Debian or Ubuntu, you also need to install locales to have locale-gen with

apt-get -y install locales

this is extracted from the very good post on that subject, from

http://jaredmarkell.com/docker-and-locales/

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