How to set systeml locale for images

Environment

• Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform
  • 3.x
  • 4.x
• JBoss EAP for OpenShift
  • 7.x

Issue

• When we deploy s2i images, it does not display the local language correctly. For example, JBoss EAP image outputs the language like this:

  08:20:00,421 INFO  [org.jboss.as] (Controller Boot Thread) WFLYSRV0025: JBoss EAP 7.0.8.GA (WildFly Core 2.1.18.Final-redhat-1) ? 9446ms ??????? -  ???? 598 ???? 306 ???????? (380 ???????????????????????????)?

• Neither setting # echo 'JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -Duser.language=ja -Duser.country=JP"' >> /opt/eap/bin/standalone.conf nor LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8 works fine. How we can correct this language issue?

Resolution

Set JAVA_OPTS_APPEND system properties for the language and encoding. For example, for Japanese:

oc set env dc <YOUR_DC_NAME> JAVA_OPTS_APPEND="-Duser.language=ja -Duser.country=JP -Dfile.encoding=UTF8"

NOTE: If the locale is changed and using JBoss EAP 7.2 or later, the livenessProbe/readinessProbe bundled with EAP will fail due to known issue This content is not included.JBEAP-23302 with the following error message. If you need to change the locale from the default, livenessProbe/readinessProbe needs a custom probe setting. JBEAP-23302 has been fixed in JBoss EAP 7.4.11.

$ oc describe pod <pod-name>
...

Events:
  Type     Reason          Age                    From               Message
  ----     ------          ----                   ----               -------
...
  Normal   Killing         3m10s                  kubelet            Container <container-name> failed liveness probe, will be restarted
  Warning  Unhealthy       3m10s (x3 over 3m30s)  kubelet            Liveness probe failed: {
    "probe.eap.dmr.EapProbe": {
        "probe.eap.dmr.ServerStatusTest": "running",
        "probe.eap.dmr.DeploymentTest": {
            "echo.war": "OK"
        },
        "probe.eap.dmr.BootErrorsTest": "No boot errors",
        "probe.eap.dmr.ServerRunningModeTest": "NORMAL"
    },
    "probe.eap.dmr.HealthCheckProbe": {
        "probe.eap.dmr.HealthCheckTest": "Exception executing test: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 13-16: ordinal not in range(128)"
    }
}

A simple custom example of livenessProbe/readinessProbe is to probe by the /health endpoint as following:

        livenessProbe:
          failureThreshold: 3
          httpGet:
            path: /health
            port: 9990
            scheme: HTTP
          initialDelaySeconds: 60
          periodSeconds: 10
          successThreshold: 1
          timeoutSeconds: 5
...
        readinessProbe:
          failureThreshold: 3
          httpGet:
            path: /health
            port: 9990
            scheme: HTTP
          initialDelaySeconds: 10
          periodSeconds: 10
          successThreshold: 1
          timeoutSeconds: 5

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