Django debug toolbar crashes when deployed on AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Question

I am running a Django app on AWS Elastic Beanstalk but Django debug toolbar is causing the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "/opt/python/run/venv/lib/python3.4/site-packages/django/core/handlers/base.py", line 235, in get_response
        response = middleware_method(request, response)
      File "/opt/python/run/venv/lib/python3.4/site-packages/debug_toolbar/middleware.py", line 123, in process_response
        response.content = insert_before.join(bits)
      File "/opt/python/run/venv/lib/python3.4/site-packages/django/http/response.py", line 315, in content
        value = self.make_bytes(value)
      File "/opt/python/run/venv/lib/python3.4/site-packages/django/http/response.py", line 235, in make_bytes
        return bytes(value.encode(self.charset))
    UnicodeEncodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't encode character '\\udcc3' in position 142917: surrogates not allowed

I did not have this problem locally or when running my django app on an AWS EC2 instance where I setup nginx and gunicorn myself. Something about Elastic Beanstalk? Maybe that it's apache?

Some details about my configuration:

Versions

Same locally as well as on AWS EBS

Python 3.4.3

Django 1.9.7

Django Toolbar 1.5

Django Settings

The following are pieces of my django settings where I activate the toolbar

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    'compare.apps.CompareConfig',
    'search.apps.SearchConfig',
    'profile.apps.ProfileConfig',
    'common.apps.CommonConfig',
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.messages',
    'django.contrib.staticfiles',
    'django_toolbar',
]

(I tried moving django_toolbar further up in the list of installed apps but it didn't help)

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = [
    'debug_toolbar.middleware.DebugToolbarMiddleware',
    'django.middleware.security.SecurityMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
    'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware',
    'django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.auth.middleware.SessionAuthenticationMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.messages.middleware.MessageMiddleware',
    'django.middleware.clickjacking.XFrameOptionsMiddleware',
]

DEBUG_TOOLBAR_PATCH_SETTINGS = False
def custom_show_toolbar(request):
    return True # Always show toolbar, for example purposes only.

DEBUG_TOOLBAR_CONFIG = {
    'SHOW_TOOLBAR_CALLBACK': custom_show_toolbar,
}

LANGUAGE_CODE = 'en-us'
TIME_ZONE = 'UTC'
USE_I18N = True
USE_L10N = True
USE_TZ = True

And in my root url conf file I have

urlpatterns += [url(r'^__debug__/', include(debug_toolbar.urls))]

There was some other SO (can't find link now) that mentioned something about adding utf-8 to one of the language or USE_*** parameters but I tried it and didn't help - but perhaps I didn't do it correctly also.

I really love the Django debug toolbar, would greatly appreciate being able to resolve this.

Any ideas?

Thanks!