crewai run crashes on Windows with UnicodeDecodeError 'charmap'

On Windows, crewai run crashes right away with UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte.

Difficulty

Easy

Time

~5 min

Steps

Fixed in

0.118.0

Last checked

Oct 17, 2026

Verified fix: PR #2711 merged on 2025-04-30. Fixed in 0.118.0 (first release published after the merge). Last checked 2026-10-17.

Symptom

On Windows, crewai run crashes right away with UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte.

Evidence what you'll see

Started after upgrading from v0.117.0 to v0.117.1
Error raised while a dependency loads a JSON file
Windows only

Cause

v0.117.1 pulled in a dependency version that read a file without UTF-8 encoding, which fails on Windows' default code page.

Fix steps

0 of 2 done

Step 1Upgrade CrewAI to a release that includes PR #2711, which pins the dependency back to a Windows-compatible version.
Step 2Until then, the reporter's workaround was staying on CrewAI v0.117.0.

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Verify the fix worked

Run crewai run on Windows and confirm it starts without the UnicodeDecodeError.

Sources and credit

Summarized in our own words from these public reports. Credit goes to their authors.

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