Import Project Failure, InvalidLocaleError: Your system's preferred encoding is `US-ASCII`, but Pants requires `UTF-8`

[alvinhao]

I'm getting the following error when trying to load a pants project in IntelliJ. I've tried exporting the locales env variables and it didn't help.
IntelliJ 2020.2.4 Ultimate
Pants Support Plugin 1.16.0

pants --target-spec-file=/private/var/folders/7h/rmwfrbf51xxd6lzbx15njjfh0000gn/T/pants_target_specs1199.in --no-quiet export --output-file=/private/var/folders/7h/rmwfrbf51xxd6lzbx15njjfh0000gn/T/pants_depmap_run456.out --formatted
Exit code: 1

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/Users/alvin.hao/.cache/pants/setup/bootstrap-Darwin-x86_64/1.14.0/bin/pants", line 11, in
sys.exit(main())
File "/Users/alvin.hao/.cache/pants/setup/bootstrap-Darwin-x86_64/1.14.0/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pants/bin/pants_loader.py", line 85, in main
PantsLoader.run()
File "/Users/alvin.hao/.cache/pants/setup/bootstrap-Darwin-x86_64/1.14.0/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pants/bin/pants_loader.py", line 79, in run
cls.ensure_locale()
File "/Users/alvin.hao/.cache/pants/setup/bootstrap-Darwin-x86_64/1.14.0/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pants/bin/pants_loader.py", line 60, in ensure_locale
""".format(encoding, cls.ENCODING_IGNORE_ENV_VAR)
pants.bin.pants_loader.InvalidLocaleError: Your system's preferred encoding is US-ASCII, but Pants requires UTF-8.
Specifically, Python's locale.getpreferredencoding() must resolve to UTF-8.

Fix it by setting the LC_* and LANG environment settings. Example:
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
Or, bypass it by setting the below environment variable.
PANTS_IGNORE_UNRECOGNIZED_ENCODING=1
Note: we cannot guarantee consistent behavior with this bypass enabled.