MongoDB mongorestore failure: locale::facet::_S_create_c_locale name not valid

I created a dump with mongodump on computer A (ubuntu 12.04 server). I moved it to computer B (ubuntu 12.04 server) and typed:

mongorestore -db db_name --drop db_dump_path

It failed and it reported:

connected to: 127.0.0.1
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::runtime_error'
what(): locale::facet::_S_create_c_locale name not valid
Aborted

I've successfully accomplished this operation before and this strange behavior has never occurred. What do I need to do to fix this?

On my distro "locale-gen" was not installed and it turned out all I had to do is set the LC_ALL environment variable. so the following command fixed it:

export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"

hopefully it will help someone else...

Actually it isn't strictly related to MongoDB. Somehow the language on computer B was not defined correctly. I managed to fix it by typing:

sudo locale-gen en_US en_US.UTF-8
sudo locale-gen it_IT it_IT.UTF-8
sudo locale-gen xx_xx xx_XX.UTF-8 ...
sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

These commands will generate and configure the needed locales. After those steps mongorestore got back working as usual.

Exporting LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8" only works if you have the en_US locale installed. If you want to avoid installing the locales package (or its equivalent on distributions other than Debian derivatives), then you can instead use:

export LC_ALL=C.UTF-8

which will not require any extra locale data.

If you are using a Mac OSX and SSH this might be issued by wrong LC_CTYPE.

$ locale 
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE=UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

Unset the wrong var.

$ unset LC_CTYPE 

Check whether locale is working fine.

$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

Now mongo also should do fine.

To make the fix permanent you can edit one of those files:

• sudo vim /etc/default/locale
• sudo vim /etc/environment

And add the line LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"