How To Check Server Timezone From PHP: A Beginner’s Guide

During PHP development, date and time management should be adequately handled. Server timezone contributes to the management of date and time within your application. Misconfigured time zones will lead to problems like miscomputed timestamps, out-of-sync events, and confused users. 

These issues become quite troublesome while dealing with users from other geographies or time-sensitive operations. Knowing how to verify and set the server’s timezone in PHP is important in an effort to have your application running smoothly. 

We will demonstrate how to check server timezone from PHP and set the timezone in a simple manner, here in this blog in an effort to avoid such mistakes.

Why Server Timezone Matters in PHP

Your server’s timezone configuration has an extreme relation to how PHP handles and displays date and time values. If your server’s timezone is different from your expected timezone or user’s timezone, it will cause issues:

• Incorrect log timestamps: When your server is in the incorrect timezone, logs may display timestamps that are not synchronized with the current time, making debugging challenging to accomplish successfully.

• Scheduled event mismatches: If your server is in a different timezone from what was expected, scheduled events like cron jobs or scheduled database backups may run at the wrong times, and from there, can cause delays or inconsistency in data.

• Unclear display of date/time to users: If the users are in different timezones, the wrong server timezone received by them can cause dates and times displayed in the wrong format, and thus confuse the users.

You require proper server timezone configuration for the application to work smoothly.

How to Check Server Timezone in PHP?

The PHP language gives you a range of inbuilt functions in order to make your work simpler in determining the current timezone setting of your server. Below are the most commonly used methods:

Method 1: Using date_default_timezone_get()

The most concise method of finding out which timezone the server is in PHP is date_default_timezone_get(). It will tell you back the default timezone upon which all the date and time functions in your script are functioning.

This is how you do it:

<?php
echo 'Server timezone is: ' . date_default_timezone_get();
?>

That will show us the timezone setting defined in PHP. The output would be ”UTC”, “America/New_York”, “Asia/Kolkata”, etc. The output will depend on server configuration.

Method 2: Using ini_get()

The ini_get () function is another option to get the timezone setting from php.ini. This will tell you what timezone is defined in your PHP configuration file.

Here is the method:

<?php
echo 'Server timezone from php.ini: ' . ini_get('date.timezone');
?>

If an empty string is returned when you execute this code, it means the php.ini file lacks the date.timezone directive. In this case, PHP is going to use the system default timezone.

Method 3: Displaying Date Info

The next best way is to show the present date and time together with the timezone identifier. You can simply use PHP’s date() function to show not just the current time and date but additionally the timezone indicator (i.e., UTC, EST, etc.).

Here is the method:

<?php
echo 'Current server time: ' . date('Y-m-d H:i:s T');
?>

This will output the current date and time in the format “YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS TIMEZONE” so you can tell which timezone is being used.

How to Set the Timezone in PHP

If you find the server timezone is not what you expect, it is easy to change it in your PHP script or your php.ini file.

Temporarily Set the Timezone in a Script

For a specific script, you can set the timezone using the date_default_timezone_set() function. For example:

<?php
date_default_timezone_set('Asia/Kolkata');
echo 'Timezone changed to: ' . date_default_timezone_get();
?>

For script execution, It will set timezone to ”Asia/Kolkata”.

Permanently Set the Timezone

Change the php.ini file of your server if you want to permanently set the timezone for all the PHP scripts. Locate the date. timezone directive and change it as shown below:

date.timezone = "Asia/Kolkata"

Once you’ve done that, you’ll need to reload your web server so that the changes will take effect.
Checking and changing server time is a simple task which can be done easily. But for more complex problems, the best way to solve them is to hire PHP developers. If your budget allows, you can also hire a PHP development company to take care of your project completely. You can even make use of offshore PHP development to reduce cost while overcoming challenges.

Conclusion

In the PHP applications you are developing, a very important time and date management feature is to verify and set the timezone of the server. Doing the above, you can be certain your PHP scripts run using the correct timezone, reducing the possibility of issues like incorrect timestamps, mismatched events, and confusing users.

Whether you are debugging bugs related to time or preparing your app for overseas users, employing the proper server timezone is a gigantic factor in maintaining your application’s time management precise and consistent at all times.