Phpstorm Terminal LC_ALL Error Fix

When a new terminal opens in PHPStorm on macOS, I was getting a weird error: bash: warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale (en_US-u-hc-h12-u-ca-gregory-u-nu-latn): Invalid argument.. Strange, I use Oh My Zsh with the Zsh shell. Why am I getting that error? Why bash? I could ignore it each time - but I wanted a fix.

The first solution I came up with was to add some environment variables to the Shell / Terminal settings in PHPStorm. I exported my LC_ALL to an en_us.UTF-8 style value - whatever was appropriate for me at the time.

I found that it did fix the problem … “fix”… but only in this one project. I would have to figure out how to globally set that setting in PHPStorm. But I still didn’t like it.

I wanted to understand why it was happening.

The reason

In my .zshrc file I had some logic to evaluate the Python environment. Something like $(pyenv init -) - and that was launching this bash process.

Then, PHPStorm would see that and not understand how to handle the new environment variable in bash - from macos - which is a BCP 47 locale identifier. If this happened in PHPStorm, it could happen in other apps that try to launch my zsh shell too. Hrm.

The Solution

The solution that works for me (and notice, I said works for me, because I’m not sure if this is the “right” solution) was to alter my .zshrc file to unset the LC_ALL if it was something more complex. Then, it would fall back to the default en / us / utf-8 one. Here’s what I did

# Fix PHPStorm + macOS BCP47 locale issue before pyenv runs
if [[ "$LC_ALL" == *"-u-"* ]]; then
    unset LC_ALL
fi

Now, if it has that -u- based locale, it is unset and the fallback is allowable in my various software.

Is this the right solution? Is there a better one? Let me know!