=============== Troubleshooting =============== This page contains some advice about errors and problems commonly encountered during the development of Django applications. .. _troubleshooting-django-admin: Problems running ``django-admin`` ================================= ``command not found: django-admin`` ----------------------------------- :doc:`django-admin ` should be on your system path if you installed Django via ``pip``. If it's not in your path, ensure you have your virtual environment activated and you can try running the equivalent command ``python -m django``. macOS permissions ----------------- If you're using macOS, you may see the message "permission denied" when you try to run ``django-admin``. This is because, on Unix-based systems like macOS, 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 ` is installed, then run the command ``sudo chmod +x django-admin``. 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. Related resources: * :doc:`Unicode in Django ` * https://wiki.python.org/moin/UnicodeDecodeError