beta.blog

I received the following awesome error message when running certbot on my machine:

UnicodeDecodeError: ‘ascii’ codec can’t decode byte 0xc3 in position 22: ordinal not in range(128)

The error message didn’t come from certbot itself but instead from the letsencrypt command line utility. Anyway I found this nice handy command to find unicode special characters that found their way in one of our config files (i.e. apache, nginx):

grep -r -P '[^\x00-\x7f]' /etc/apache2 /etc/letsencrypt /etc/nginx

Afterwards edit the according config file and remove any non-ascii characters from it in order to get rid of that error message.