When upgrading the Lambo config, the comment setting the time in the old config doesn't respect my time zone

[mattstauffer]

Instead it uses UTC.

[jonsugar]

@mattstauffer This seems to be a PHP and/or Laravel Zero issue.

In vendor/laravel-zero/foundation/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Bootstrap/LoadConfiguration.php It does the following:

date_default_timezone_set($config->get('app.timezone', 'UTC'));

If I set date.timezone = 'America/New_York in php.ini it is ignored as the above implies.

If I make the following changes to vendor/laravel-zero/foundation/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Bootstrap/LoadConfiguration.php then the php.ini value is honored.

date_default_timezone_set($config->get('app.timezone', date_default_timezone_get()));

If I set timezone in config/app.php to America/New_York it is honored.

TL;DR
I don't think this is solvable in a nice way. In my case, I don't really notice it as I live in UTC/GMT which PHP and Laravel Zero default to.

It seems weird to advise users to set timezone in config/app.php. I'm not sure it's correct for Laravel Zero to set the default timezone to something other than UTC.

[mattstauffer]

Hm, I sort of think it might be ideal to set it to the current user's computer's time zone instead of UTC?

[jonsugar]

PHP doesn't let you do that. You have to manually set it in php.ini or at runtime. That's the issue.

[mattstauffer]

Womp. OK.

[jonsugar]

I got annoyed by the Lambo time zone thing 🤷🏻

After many hours of googling, and trying various fixes, apparently, PHP does have a solution. The following addition to config/app.php should sort it:

<?php
return [
    ⁝
    'timezone' => IntlTimeZone::createDefault()->getID(),
    ⁝
];

the only caveat is that ext-intl extension must be installed but I feel like most people have that?

The above solution works on all operating systems but if ext-intl is not installed then the following works on Mac OS:

<?php
return [
    ⁝
    'timezone' => exec('/bin/ls -l /etc/localtime|/usr/bin/cut -d"/" -f8-'),
    ⁝
];

and the following for Debian/Ubuntu distros:

<?php
return [
    ⁝
    'timezone' => exec('cat /etc/timezone'),
    ⁝
];