I set up an instance according to the test/README.md - everything was installing fine and I could log in. Only difference is that instead of conda, I used a "normal" virtualenv to install the dependencies.

When trying to load some data, I always get an error due to failed encoding of the Angstrom sign that is added to the plot in https://github.com/neutrons/web_reflectivity/blob/master/web_reflectivity/fitting/view_util.py#L755 - if I replace that with "AA" it works.

Are you by chance operating in an environment with sys.setdefaultencoding("utf8")?