Ruby on Rails / ChiliProject encoding issues

This week I've decided to exchange Redmine for the ChiliProject. The reason for this is the support for Ruby 1.9. My Apache Passenger server runs Ruby 1.9 so for Redmine I needed a seperate webserver.

When I tried to access the "My Account" page I recieved the following error:

ArgumentError (invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII):
  <internal:prelude>:10:in `synchronize'
  passenger (3.0.7) lib/phusion_passenger/rack/request_handler.rb:96:in `process_request'
  passenger (3.0.7) lib/phusion_passenger/abstract_request_handler.rb:513:in `accept_and_process_next_request'
  passenger (3.0.7) lib/phusion_passenger/abstract_request_handler.rb:274:in `main_loop'
  passenger (3.0.7) ...
`handle_spawn_application'
  passenger (3.0.7) lib/phusion_passenger/abstract_server.rb:357:in `server_main_loop'
  passenger (3.0.7) lib/phusion_passenger/abstract_server.rb:206:in `start_synchronously'
  passenger (3.0.7) helper-scripts/passenger-spawn-server:99:in `<main>'

Rendering /data/www/rails/chili/public/500.html (500 Internal Server Error)

Solution

How should I solve this? The chiliproject has an issue related to this: https://www.chiliproject.org/issues/591.

The following Apache configuration fixed the issue: (The sample is on a FreeBSD system)

I added the following code to a file in the /usr/local/apache22/envvars.d/environment.env

export LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"

Problems I ruled out or fixed

While trying I also made sure the following things were configured:

I made sure the database is UTF-8. I re-created the database
an ran the migrations again.

create database chiliproject character set utf8;

I used the mysql2 connector instead of the mysql connector in database.yml