===============
Troubleshooting
===============

This page contains some advice about errors and problems commonly encountered
during the development of Django applications.

.. _troubleshooting-django-admin-py:

Problems running django-admin.py
================================

"command not found: django-admin.py"
------------------------------------

:doc:`django-admin.py </ref/django-admin>` should be on your system path if you
installed Django via ``python setup.py``. If it's not on your path, you can
find it in ``site-packages/django/bin``, where ``site-packages`` is a directory
within your Python installation. Consider symlinking to :doc:`django-admin.py
</ref/django-admin>` from some place on your path, such as
:file:`/usr/local/bin`.

Script name may differ in distribution packages
-----------------------------------------------

If you installed Django using a Linux distribution's package manager
(e.g. ``apt-get`` or ``yum``) ``django-admin.py`` may have been renamed to
``django-admin``; use that instead.

Mac OS X permissions
--------------------

If you're using Mac OS X, you may see the message "permission denied" when
you try to run ``django-admin.py``. This is because, on Unix-based systems like
OS X, a file must be marked as "executable" before it can be run as a program.
To do this, open Terminal.app and navigate (using the ``cd`` command) to the
directory where :doc:`django-admin.py </ref/django-admin>` is installed, then
run the command ``sudo chmod +x django-admin.py``.

Running virtualenv on Windows
-----------------------------

If you used virtualenv_ to :ref:`install Django <installing-official-release>`
on Windows, you may get an ``ImportError`` when you try to run
``django-admin.py``. This is because Windows does not run the
Python interpreter from your virtual environment unless you invoke it
directly. Instead, prefix all commands that use .py files with ``python`` and
use the full path to the file, like so:
``python C:\pythonXY\Scripts\django-admin.py``.

.. _virtualenv: http://www.virtualenv.org/

Miscellaneous
=============

I'm getting a ``UnicodeDecodeError``. What am I doing wrong?
------------------------------------------------------------

This class of errors happen when a bytestring containing non-ASCII sequences is
transformed into a Unicode string and the specified encoding is incorrect. The
output generally looks like this::

    UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x?? in position ?:
    ordinal not in range(128)

The resolution mostly depends on the context, however here are two common
pitfalls producing this error:

* Your system locale may be a default ASCII locale, like the "C" locale on
  UNIX-like systems (can be checked by the ``locale`` command). If it's the
  case, please refer to your system documentation to learn how you can change
  this to a UTF-8 locale.

* You created raw bytestrings, which is easy to do on Python 2::

      my_string = 'café'

  Either use the ``u''`` prefix or even better, add the
  ``from __future__ import unicode_literals`` line at the top of your file
  so that your code will be compatible with Python 3.2 which doesn't support
  the ``u''`` prefix.

Related resources:

* :doc:`Unicode in Django </ref/unicode>`
* https://wiki.python.org/moin/UnicodeDecodeError