Allows to set environment variables of Postgres

[MarcMil]

On some misconfigured linux systems we've encountered "error: invalid locale settings; check LANG and LC_* environment variables". Since we intend to use Postgres in our application on customer machines, we want Postgres to work even in those conditions.

[tomix26]

Rather than allowing arbitrary environment variable settings, I would prefer having meaningful default values that work under any conditions, so the library user doesn’t have to deal with this at all.

If I understand correctly, the LC_* environment variables are just default values that can later be overridden when calling the initdb command? If so, this should already be possible using the EmbeddedPostgres.Builder#setLocaleConfig() method.

In that case, the problem could be resolved by setting some reasonable defaults, such as:

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"

Alternatively, resetting the environment variables might also work:

LANG=""
LC_ALL=""
LC_CTYPE=""

Could you please confirm whether my assumptions are valid? Thanks!

[MarcMil]

You're correct! Thanks for the hint.
Unsetting the variable does not seem to cause issues, postgres is using the C locale then as a fallback. However, I could replicate the customer's error message when setting the environment variables to non-conforming values.
It then works when I use setLocaleConfig("locale", "en_US.UTF-8");; that takes precedence over the environment values.

I'll close this issue then. Thanks!