Configuring locale settings

Puppet supports locale-specific strings in output, and it detects your locale from your system configuration. This provides localized strings, report messages, and log messages for the locale’s language when available.

Upon startup, Puppet looks for a set of environment variables on *nix systems, or the code page setting on Windows. When Puppet finds one that is set, it uses that locale whether it is run from the command line or as a service.

For help setting your operating system locale or adding new locales, consult its documentation. This section covers setting the locale for Puppet services.

Checking your locale settings on *nix and macOS

To check your current locale settings, run the locale command. This outputs the settings used by your current shell.

$ locale
LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

To see which locales are supported by your system, run locale -a, which outputs a list of available locales. Note that Puppet might not have localized strings for every available locale.

To check the current status of environment variables that might conflict with or override your locale settings, use the set command. For example, this command lists the set environment variables and searches for those containing LANG or LC_:

sudo set | egrep 'LANG|LC_'

Checking your locale settings on Windows

To check your current locale setting, run the Get-WinSystemLocale command from PowerShell.

PS C:\> Get-WinSystemLocale
LCID             Name             DisplayName
----             ----             -----------
1033             en-US            English (United States)

To check your system’s current code page setting, run the chcp command.

Setting your locale on *nix with an environment variable

You can use environment variables to set your locale for processes started on the command line. For most Linux distributions, set the LANG variable to your preferred locale, and the LANGUAGE variable to an empty string. On SLES, also set the LC_ALL variable to an empty string.

For example, to set the locale to Japanese for a terminal session on SLES:

export LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8
export LANGUAGE=''
export LC_ALL=''

To set the locale for the Puppet agent service, you can add these export statements to:

/etc/sysconfig/puppet on RHEL and its derivatives
/etc/default/puppet on Debian, Ubuntu, and their derivatives
After updating the file, restart the Puppet service to apply the change.

Setting your locale for the Puppet agent service on macOS

To set the locale for the Puppet agent service on macOS, update the LANG setting in the /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.puppetlabs.puppet.plist file.

<dict>
        <key>LANG</key>
        <string>ja_JP.UTF-8</string>
</dict>

After updating the file, restart the Puppet service to apply the change.

Setting your locale on Windows

On Windows, Puppet uses the LANG environment variable if it is set. If not, it uses the configured region, as set in the Administrator tab of the Region control panel.

On Windows 10, you can use PowerShell to set the system locale:

Set-WinSystemLocale en-US

Disabling internationalized strings

Use the optional Boolean disable_i18n setting to disable the use of internationalized strings. You can configure this setting in puppet.conf. If set to true, Puppet disables localized strings in log messages, reports, and parts of the command line interface. This can improve performance when using Puppet modules, especially if environment caching is disabled, and even if you don’t need localized strings or the modules aren’t localized. This setting is false by default in open source Puppet.

If you’re experiencing performance issues, configure this setting in the [server] section of the primary Puppet server's puppet.conf file. To force unlocalized messages, which are in English by default, configure this section in a node’s [main] or [user] sections of puppet.conf.