Redmine

Is the encoding of your My SQL database utf8mb4 or utf8? The error may be due to the encoding not being utf8mb4 or utf8.

I'm not sure how to determine the encoding of the database, it was created by Redmine when I first set up the system. I did not take any special steps.

Similarly I was looking at GIT documentation and I'm not sure how it determines the encoding of the commit messages, the repository in question is a clone of a bitbucket repository and from my reading I think the commit messages encoding is dependent on the encoding of the client used to do each commit.

I think you are on the right track, I found some posts on how to determine the encoding with the following results:

bash-4.2# mysql -uroot -pxxx redmine -e 'SELECT default_character_set_name FROM information_schema.SCHEMATA WHERE schema_name = "redmine";'
mysql: [Warning] Using a password on the command line interface can be insecure.
+----------------------------+
| default_character_set_name |
+----------------------------+
| latin1                     |
+----------------------------+
bash-4.2# mysql -uroot -pxxx redmine -e 'show variables like "char%";'                                     
mysql: [Warning] Using a password on the command line interface can be insecure.
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| Variable_name            | Value                      |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| character_set_client     | latin1                     |
| character_set_connection | latin1                     |
| character_set_database   | latin1                     |
| character_set_filesystem | binary                     |
| character_set_results    | latin1                     |
| character_set_server     | latin1                     |
| character_set_system     | utf8                       |
| character_sets_dir       | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+

The next question is how to fix it. I see many very old posts suggesting that this can be fixed by exporting and re-importing the database but nothing recent, Is there a "proper" way to do this?

#21398, #31921, #32140 and HowTo_convert_a_database_from_utf8_to_utf8mb4 page contain enough information to help your migrate your database to utf8mb4.

Thanks for the feedback.

I followed the instructions and I believe the DB is now using utf8mb4:

bash-4.2# mysql -uroot -pxxxxxx redmine -e 'SELECT default_character_set_name FROM information_schema.SCHEMATA WHERE schema_name = "redmine";'
mysql: [Warning] Using a password on the command line interface can be insecure.
+----------------------------+
| default_character_set_name |
+----------------------------+
| utf8mb4                    |
+----------------------------+

mysql -uroot -pxxxxxxxx redmine -e 'show variables like "char%";'                                                                     
mysql: [Warning] Using a password on the command line interface can be insecure.
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| Variable_name            | Value                      |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| character_set_client     | latin1                     |
| character_set_connection | latin1                     |
| character_set_database   | utf8mb4                    |
| character_set_filesystem | binary                     |
| character_set_results    | latin1                     |
| character_set_server     | latin1                     |
| character_set_system     | utf8                       |
| character_sets_dir       | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+

but I am still getting the exact same error on this one repository.

I have deleted the repository link in the redmine settings repository page and re-addded it just in case it needed to be set up before adding the repository but the results is the same.

I got it working. In addition to the instructions you provided above, I needed to convert the table using the following command:

ALTER TABLE changesets CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

Probably need to convert all the tables but I think this fixed my specific issue.

Thanks for the support.