Found character that cannot start any token while scanning for the next token at line 86 column 1 -e LANG=en_US.UTF-8

installation
1

For some reason it appears my discourse/docker instance crashed and trying to start the app with launcher start app results in:

starting up existing container
+ /usr/bin/docker start app
app

but then visiting the site I have a completely blank screen

Then trying a launcher rebuild app results in the following error message:

Ensuring discourse docker is up to date
Fetching origin
Discourse Docker is up-to-date
Stopping old container
+ /usr/bin/docker stop -t 10 app
app
(<unknown>): found character that cannot start any token while scanning for the next token at line 86 column 1 -e LANG=en_US.UTF-8
YAML syntax error. Please check your /var/discourse/containers/*.yml config files.

I’ve looked at my app.yaml and I’m not sure what is wrong?

The lines at that part of the config are:

env:
  LANG: en_US.UTF-8
  ## TODO: How many concurrent web requests are supported?
  ## With 2GB we recommend 3-4 workers, with 1GB only 2
  UNICORN_WORKERS: 2
  ##

Any troubleshooting ideas greatly appreciated as our site is completely offline now :frowning:

edit
I’ve also run full apt-get updates/dist-upgrade etc and updated all packages to latest. Actually the service did finally manage to start, but I’m still unable to rebuild the app due to the above error.

2

ok As it turns out, our log files were completely filling up the server disk space, our docker instance’s access.log ended up taking up a whopping 17gb! I found this thread: Docker install allows nginx log files to keep growing?

Which recommends a git pull and rebuild, which is what I’ve been trying to accomplish anyhow, so any tips would still be greatly appreciated!

2 Likes
3

Another unfortunate disk space hog I noticed was /var/lib/docker/aufs with a huge 13.4gb, so combined these two directories are using over 30gb of disk space =\

I found this thread https://meta.discourse.org/t/docker-diff-very-big-how-to-clean/12696/5

which also mentions an update and rebuild, so it would be great to figure out how to take care of this error and rebuild the app!

4

Try apt-get clean, then ./launcher cleanup app, then a rebuild.

1 Like
5

Unfortunately this didn’t work :frowning:
./launcher cleanup app did manage to free some space, but the rebuild still fails:

Ensuring discourse docker is up to date
Fetching origin
remote: Counting objects: 12, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (7/7), done.
remote: Total 12 (delta 2), reused 1 (delta 1), pack-reused 3
Unpacking objects: 100% (12/12), done.
From https://github.com/discourse/discourse_docker
   4b733d8..9473d53  master     -> origin/master
Updating Discourse Docker
Updating 4b733d8..9473d53
Fast-forward
 launcher                          |  15 -------
 scripts/mailtest                  | 179 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 templates/cloudflare.template.yml |  22 ++++++++++
 3 files changed, 22 insertions(+), 194 deletions(-)
 delete mode 100755 scripts/mailtest
 create mode 100644 templates/cloudflare.template.yml
Ensuring discourse docker is up to date
Fetching origin
Discourse Docker is up-to-date
Stopping old container
+ /usr/bin/docker stop -t 10 app
app
(<unknown>): found character that cannot start any token while scanning for the next token at line 86 column 1 -e LANG=en_US.UTF-8
YAML syntax error. Please check your /var/discourse/containers/*.yml config files.
6

Oh yeah, that means you screwed up your YML file. Use an online YAML validator like http://yamllint.com .

1 Like
7

Ah right you are, it’s so strange because the console was reporting the
offending LANG: en_US.UTF-8 (which was on line 36), yet accurately the
incorrect tabspacing on line 86.

Worked perfectly and this freed 22gb of space on our server!

1 Like