The Problem - Rendering Unicode Characters using Glabels

I have a Perl script running on an Apache webserver that launches glabels-3-batch and given a data input file and a glabels template outputs a label as a PDF document.

This is in a Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS container running on Docker Community Edition on my MacBook Pro

The problem is that I have been using a $Latex \beta $  (beta) character in the file and when running from the command line with a UTF-8 language configured (en_AU.UTF-8) it works fine...

But from a web server, which is running as the www-data user the line with the $Latex \beta $ (beta) value in it is missing...

I've traced the problem to not having a LANG environment variable specified in the environment that the www-data user is running under.

What doesn't work

I tried adding
PerlSetEnv LANG en_AU.UTF-8
to /etc/apache/apache2.conf
I also tried adding 
export LANG=en_AU.UTF-8
to /etc/apache/envars
But both of the above didn't add the LANG setting to the environment

The Fix

To test the environment I used this script placed at cgi-bin/vars.pl

What worked was adding
SetEnv LANG en_AU.UTF-8
to /etc/apache/apache2.conf

Viewing your mod_perl / CGI Environment

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<span class="hljs-comment">#!/usr/bin/perl -wT</span>
<span class="hljs-keyword">use</span> strict;
<span class="hljs-keyword">use</span> CGI <span class="hljs-string">qw(:standard)</span>;
<span class="hljs-keyword">use</span> CGI::Carp <span class="hljs-string">qw(warningsToBrowser fatalsToBrowser)</span>;
 
<span class="hljs-keyword">print</span> header;
<span class="hljs-keyword">print</span> start_html(&amp;amp;quot;Environment&amp;amp;quot;);
 
<span class="hljs-keyword">foreach</span> <span class="hljs-keyword">my</span> $key (<span class="hljs-keyword">sort</span>(<span class="hljs-keyword">keys</span>(%ENV))) {
    <span class="hljs-keyword">print</span> &amp;amp;quot;$key = $ENV{$key}&amp;amp;amp;<span class="hljs-keyword">lt</span>;br&amp;amp;<span class="hljs-keyword">gt</span>;\n&amp;amp;quot;;
}