This article covers:
- How to Setup Time Zone on Your Web Server based on LAMP Stack
Audiences of this article:
- LAMP Stack Admin
Change Linux Timezone
To check timezone in a Linux OS such as Ubuntu:
timedatectl
The output looks like this:
Local time: Fri 2020-04-10 15:10:28 AEST Universal time: Fri 2020-04-10 05:10:28 UTC RTC time: Fri 2020-04-10 05:10:29 Time zone: Australia/Perth (AEST, +1000) System clock synchronized: yes systemd-timesyncd.service active: yes RTC in local TZ: no
For example, we need to change OS’s time zone from Australia/Perth to Australia/Sydney. Make sure the new timezone are supported by both OS and PHP. Check PHP supported Australia timezone here.
To find out a list of supported timezone in Ubuntu:
timedatectl list-timezones | grep -i australia # Output timezones Australia/Adelaide Australia/Brisbane Australia/Broken_Hill Australia/Currie Australia/Darwin Australia/Eucla Australia/Hobart Australia/Lindeman Australia/Lord_Howe Australia/Melbourne Australia/Perth Australia/Sydney
To Change Ubuntu timezone:
# Firstly unlink current timezone sudo unlink /etc/localtime # Link new timezone with local time sudo ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/Sydney /etc/localtime
Change PHP Timezone
Firstly, find out the current PHP version:
php -v
In our case it’s 7.1, then edit php.ini file used by Apache
pico /etc/php/7.1/apache2/php.ini
Un-comment line “;date.timezone =” change it to:
date.timezone = Australia/Sydney
Reload Apache 2
sudo systemctl reload apache2
Have a look at your access log to see if log time is the same as your local time, below is the default apache access log.
tail -f /var/log/apache2/access.log
It’s important to set up both PHP timezone and server OS timezone to your local time to ensure your website is running in the correct timezone. Also keep it in mind that, some third party modules can ignore your timezone settings and use UTC instead.
