Unicodedecodeerror with runserver

Question

After setting up all what django requires, I tried the runserver command and I caught an error:

UnicodeDecodeError

Answer 1

This sounds like this Python issue. If your computer name has non-ASCII characters this will fail. You may:

1. Issue the runserver command with explicit host and port: python manage.py runserver 127.0.0.1:8000
2. Change your computer name to a string that only contains ASCII characters.

Answer 2

I hit this issue on python 3.4 with the following situation :

• Server did have an ascii-only hostname (like host1)
• The /etc/hosts file did not contain an entry for my hostname
• There was no available DNS resolver (offline computer)

After adding the following entry to the /etc/hosts file, no further UnicodeDecodeError exceptions were thrown.

127.0.0.1 localhost host1

Answer 3

I just had this issue because I accidentally visited the site with https instead of http. Switching back to http fixed it.