uWSGI Gateway: UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2

[gianlucagiacometti]

Hello everybody.
Can someone help me with the following issue?
I installed slurm-web 4.0.0.1 on Ubuntu 24.04 (on a LXC container).
The gateway works and I can open the page at port 5011 and see my cluster working (for the sake of precision, I set the IP address, not localhost and, at the moment, I have no ldap authentication).
Then I followed the documentation and I set up apache with proxy_uwsgi (just copied and pasted the basic conf on port 80), and I'm experiencing the following error:

Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: Traceback (most recent call last):
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: File "/usr/share/slurm-web/wsgi/agent/slurm-web-agent.py", line 12, in
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: application = SlurmwebAppAgent(
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/slurmweb/apps/agent.py", line 47, in init
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: SlurmwebWebApp.init(self, seed)
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/slurmweb/apps/init.py", line 90, in init
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: SlurmwebGenericApp.init(self, seed)
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/slurmweb/apps/init.py", line 61, in init
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: self.settings = RuntimeSettings.yaml_definition(seed.conf_defs)
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rfl/settings/init.py", line 223, in yaml_definition
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: return cls(SettingsDefinition(SettingsDefinitionLoaderYaml(path=path)))
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rfl/settings/definition.py", line 29, in init
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: self.content = yaml.safe_load(fh)
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/yaml/init.py", line 125, in safe_load
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: return load(stream, SafeLoader)
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/yaml/init.py", line 79, in load
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: loader = Loader(stream)
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/yaml/loader.py", line 34, in init
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: Reader.init(self, stream)
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/yaml/reader.py", line 85, in init
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: self.determine_encoding()
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/yaml/reader.py", line 124, in determine_encoding
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: self.update_raw()
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/yaml/reader.py", line 178, in update_raw
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: data = self.stream.read(size)
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: File "/usr/lib/python3.12/encodings/ascii.py", line 26, in decode
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: return codecs.ascii_decode(input, self.errors)[0]
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 5774: ordinal not in range(128)
Jan 03 11:50:56 hpc-controller uwsgi[41967]: unable to load app 0 (mountpoint='') (callable not found or import error)

Any suggestions on "UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 5774: ordinal not in range(128)"?
Thank you in advance.

[rezib]

Hello @gianlucagiacometti, I think this can be due to the default locale in your container. You may have to install additional locales in your container (see https://stackoverflow.com/a/59292909 for instance) and change default locale to something like en_US.UTF-8 or force PYTHONIOENCODING="UTF-8" for uwsgi service.

[gianlucagiacometti]

Well, it's indeed a problem of default locale, but not because it was missing. I had en_GB.UTF-8. I switched to US and the error disappeared... That's rather annoying. I guess because in the slurm-web-agent & gateway ini files there is env=en_US. This is something that should be investigated, because it should not happen.
Thank you very much for your suggestion.
Anyway, now all errors disappeared in journalctl, but I still have this error:

And no errors in Apache logs either.
I will investigate further tomorrow.

[gianlucagiacometti]

Ok I just forgot to switch off the native agent and gateway, my trivial mistake.

Anyway, I checked the issue with locale, and I found out that the system locale MUST be the same as the one in:

/usr/share/slurm-web/wsgi/agent/slurm-web-agent.ini
/usr/share/slurm-web/wsgi/gateway/slurm-web-gateway.ini

If I change US to GB in the ini file it works. This REGARDLESS of if both locales are generated and present in the system.
I think that this should be specified in the documentation. I will live with US, since a future update could change the ini files back to their original version.

Thank you again @rezib for helping me solve the issue.

[rezib]

I fully agree @gianlucagiacometti. I didn't realize this locale was a requirement for running Slurm-web with uwsgi. I just opened #432 to clear this up. Thank you for reporting and for the constructive feedback! 🙏