CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpdatetimelaravelphp-carbon
ambe5960
ambe5960

Reputation: 2000

Carbon now time wrong

I just started using the Carbon extension (seems pretty sweet so far), but am confused on the Carbon::now() function. According to the docs, it seems as though this function should reflect the current time in the users current timezone, however, I seem to get a time that is an hour ahead of GMT.

i.e. Carbon::now() says 2015-01-01 17:26:46 when I am on PST and it is actually currently 2015-01-01 08:26:46.

Do I have to detect and put in a users local timezone for all instances?

What gives? (I very well may have a fundamental misunderstanding of how a website gets a users local time)

Upvotes: 16

Views: 42366

Answers (5)

navid
navid

Reputation: 1398

For anyone else wondering why (sometimes) Carbon::now() results different than new DateTime() :

Running the following...

public function time()
{
    $date = Carbon::now();
    echo $date;
    echo "<BR>";

    return $date;
}

made me understand what's going on. It printed:

2020-09-09 18:03:15
"2020-09-09T13:33:15.824992Z"

The first one is correct and its timezone is the one set in config/app.timezone. Calling new DateTime() results the same. The second one is the result of laravel controller. It shows the date in UTC timezone. This is how laravel converts it (using Carbon's toJSON method). But the timezone of the date is correct and running:

$anotherDate = Carbon::parse('2020-09-09 18:30:00');
echo "diff_mins : " . $anotherDate->diff($date)->i;

shows:

diff_mins : 26

as expected.

Update:

Check this in case you need to change the behavior for your model serialization.

Upvotes: 2

chieeu.73
chieeu.73

Reputation: 21

There are two main ways to change the timezone.
Option 1
From your project root directory, open the config directory.
Edit the app.php file next and the timezone value from UTC to the desired timezone from the list of available timezones.
'timezone' => 'Asia/YOUR_LOCATION',
Option 2
Make a modification in the .env file to specify the timezone as follows:
APP_TIMEZONE='Asia/YOUR_LOCATION'
Then, add the following in the app.php file:
'timezone' => env('APP_TIMEZONE', 'UTC'),
Finally,
php artisan config:clear

Upvotes: 1

Risheekant Vishwakarma
Risheekant Vishwakarma

Reputation: 1046

Change your time zone in config/app.php

 'timezone' => 'YOUR TIME ZONE',

Upvotes: 9

Frank L
Frank L

Reputation: 207

Carbon is UTC based therefore simply doing Carbon::now() will output the time in UTC format

You have to specify the timezone for an accurate reflection of the dateTime in your city or area.

There are two ways to do this. You can either do:

Carbon::now('PST') OR Carbon::now('Continent/City') like (Carbon::now('America/Montreal') for example

Upvotes: 18

AStopher
AStopher

Reputation: 4561

This appears to be because the timezone of your server is different to your own.

This could be caused by:

  • Server misconfiguration
  • Physical location of the server is in a different timezone
  • Policies of your provider could also cause this. If your provider decides they want to operate on the same timezone on every server they have throughout the world, this will cause issues.

The server's timezone appears to be CET (Central European Time) which is +1 GMT, as you described.

To fix this, you should change the timezone in your php.ini file (instructions are from the link):

  1. Open your php.ini file
  2. Add the following line of code to top of your php.ini file:

date.timezone = "US/Central"

Alternatively you should replace the US/Central timezone with the desired timezone as outlined here if you wish PHP to use another timezone.

Upvotes: 11

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