Ana (Jun 16 2026 at 18:40): Ana (Jun 16 2026 at 18:40):Hi everyone,
I'm deploying Dataverse using gdcc/dataverse:6.10.1-noble docker image and would like to set a default language other than English.
What is the recommended way to do this? Are there any environment variables or configuration settings that need to be changed?
I have already configured multiple languages in the header language dropdown, and they appear correctly.
However, regardless of the order in which the languages are configured, English always remains the default language when accessing the site
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Jun 16 2026 at 18:46):Hi! Let's see, I assume you're following this, generally: https://guides.dataverse.org/en/6.10.1/container/running/demo.html#multiple-languages
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Jun 16 2026 at 18:48):When you create the languages.zip file... what if you omit the en_US/*.properties files? Does that help?
Ana (Jun 16 2026 at 20:03):No, that didn't work for me
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Jun 16 2026 at 20:06):Bah. I wonder if anyone has gotten this to work. :thinking:
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Jun 16 2026 at 20:08):@Ana would you be able to ask at https://groups.google.com/g/dataverse-community ? Someone there might know.
Ana (Jun 16 2026 at 20:15):Yes, sure! I'll ask there. In a Dataverse installation without containers, I was able to solve this by editing the faces-config.xml file
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Jun 16 2026 at 20:18):Huh, interesting.
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Jun 16 2026 at 20:19):Note to self that this issue is related: allow language settings to be configured with MPConfig #10963
Leo Andreev (Jun 16 2026 at 20:37):What happens if you edit faces-config.xml in place in a container deployment, and restart payara? (that would be a very hacky way to solve this; just trying to understand if there is some reason why this would not even work w/ containers)
It sounds like a real solution is to make that default setting in faces-config configurable - ?
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Jun 16 2026 at 21:00):@Ana I think I misread your first message. You're ok with English being present, right? You just want a different language as the default. Like you, I thought the order in this JSON would determine it:
curl "http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:Languages?unblock-key=unblockme" -X PUT -d '[{"locale":"en","title":"English"},{"locale":"fr","title":"Français"}]'
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Jun 16 2026 at 21:01):When we were in Barcelona recently, the language that the laptop was in determined which language showed up by default for the "modern" UI: https://demo.dataverse.org/modern
But you're talking about the old JSF UI, I'm sure.
Ana (Jun 16 2026 at 21:39):@Leo Andreev I just tried it, and it worked.
I was wondering if there's an environment variable or configuration setting that can be used to set the default language, rather than editing the file directly
Ana (Jun 16 2026 at 21:45):@Philip Durbin 🚀 Yes, that's right
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Jun 18 2026 at 10:21):@Ana please feel free to open an issue about this at https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/issues
Last updated: Aug 18 2026 at 08:27 UTC