ArgumentError: invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII

The problem is that I use capistrano, a seemingly decent tool that uses a spartan environment (similar to cron) to execute commands and would not work even if you were to set these variables in /etc/profile.

The workaround I used is the following

default_environment['LANG'] = 'en_US.UTF-8'
default_environment['LC_LANG'] = 'en_US.UTF-8'
default_environment['LC_ALL'] = 'en_US.UTF-8'

which can be placed in deploy.rb and will set environment variables upon deploy