docs: Note UTF-8 requirements for databases

MySQL 5.3 defaulted to 'latin1' encoding, meaning users would need to
explicitly configure their databases to use 'utf8'. Call this out.

Signed-off-by: Stephen Finucane <stephen@that.guru>
Closes: #393

diff --git a/docs/deployment/installation.rst b/docs/deployment/installation.rst
index 6681002f849f48f848ac7de48a119a1fad5764be..348af0ee2bdc66e9c19cfbd4c177dcf6124820e1 100644 (file)
--- a/docs/deployment/installation.rst
+++ b/docs/deployment/installation.rst
@@ -126,6 +126,17 @@ done later.
 
 __ https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/auth-methods.html#AUTH-PEER
 
+.. note::
+
+    As noted in the `Django documentation`__, Django expects databases to be
+    configured with an encoding of UTF-8 or UTF-16. If using MySQL, you may
+    need to configure this this explicitly as older versions defaulted to
+    `latin1` encoding. Refer to the `MySQL documentation`__ for more
+    information.
+
+    __ https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/ref/unicode/
+    __ https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/en/charset.html
+
 
 Patchwork
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