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PHP date() time not corresponding with system time

Posted on June 24, 2020

I set the right server time with the help of this tutorial: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-time-synchronization-on-ubuntu-16-04

When I type “date” in the console, the correct time is now shown. But the PHP date(‘H:i’) command still shows 2 hours earlier. I have reset Apache2.

How can this happen and what can I do about it?



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Thanks again for your help! This is interesting. timedetectl was already set to Europe/Amsterdam, but this is the result:

 Local time: Thu 2020-07-09 09:15:26 CEST
 Universal time: Thu 2020-07-09 07:15:26 UTC
 RTC time: Thu 2020-07-09 07:15:27
 Time zone: Europe/Amsterdam (CEST, +0200)
 System clock synchronized: yes
 systemd-timesyncd.service active: yes
 RTC in local TZ: no

So the local time is correct, but php seems to use the Universal or RTC time in the time() function. Now I found the PHP localtime() function: https://www.w3schools.com/php/func_date_localtime.asp

But this code:

echo 'time: ' . date('H:i');
echo "<br>";
print_r(localtime(time(),true));

even gives this result:

time: 07:35
Array ( [tm_sec] => 15 [tm_min] => 35 [tm_hour] => 7 [tm_mday] => 9 [tm_mon] => 6 [tm_year] => 120 [tm_wday] => 4 [tm_yday] => 190 [tm_isdst] => 0 )

So the localtime() function doesn’t seem to do anything. (changing back the timezone in php.ini from Detroid to Amsterdam doesn’t have any effect on the output above (didn’t forget to restart Apache)).

Hi @Roelandvo,

You’ll need to update the default timezone of your PHP in your php.ini. I’ll recommend setting it like so :

date.timezone="Europe/London"

Now, the default is Europe/London however you can set it to any timezone you wish.

Please make sure you’ve added it to your PHP.ini as this is related to your PHP rather than the server itself.

Regards, KFSys

Hi @KFSys,

Thanks for your help. It doesn’t work until now; I changed the php.ini to:

[Date]
; Defines the default timezone used by the date functions
; http://php.net/date.timezone
 date.timezone = Europe/Amsterdam

I also checked via phpinfo() to be sure that this is the right ini file. Then restarted the server with

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

But the time is still 2 hours behind.

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