# Django 1.8.18.dev20170123152445 documentation

# Troubleshooting

This page contains some advice about errors and problems commonly encountered during the development of Django applications.

## Problems running django-admin

### “command not found: django-admin”

django-admin should be on your system path if you installed Django via `python setup.py`. If it’s not on your path, you can find it in `site-packages/django/bin`, where `site-packages` is a directory within your Python installation. Consider symlinking to django-admin from some place on your path, such as `/usr/local/bin`.

If `django-admin` doesn’t work but `django-admin.py` does, you’re probably using a version of Django that doesn’t match the version of this documentation. `django-admin` is new in Django 1.7.

### Mac OS X permissions

If you’re using Mac OS X, you may see the message “permission denied” when you try to run `django-admin`. This is because, on Unix-based systems like OS X, a file must be marked as “executable” before it can be run as a program. To do this, open Terminal.app and navigate (using the `cd` command) to the directory where django-admin is installed, then run the command `sudo chmod +x django-admin`.

## Miscellaneous

### I’m getting a `UnicodeDecodeError`. What am I doing wrong?

This class of errors happen when a bytestring containing non-ASCII sequences is transformed into a Unicode string and the specified encoding is incorrect. The output generally looks like this:

    UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x?? in position ?:
    ordinal not in range(128)

The resolution mostly depends on the context, however here are two common pitfalls producing this error:

- Your system locale may be a default ASCII locale, like the “C” locale on UNIX-like systems (can be checked by the `locale` command). If it’s the case, please refer to your system documentation to learn how you can change this to a UTF-8 locale.

- You created raw bytestrings, which is easy to do on Python 2:

      my_string = 'café'

  Either use the `u''` prefix or even better, add the `from __future__ import unicode_literals` line at the top of your file so that your code will be compatible with Python 3.2 which doesn’t support the `u''` prefix.

Related resources:

- Unicode in Django
- https://wiki.python.org/moin/UnicodeDecodeError