Carbon now time wrong

14
votes

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)

4
phpdatetimelaravelphp-carbon
now() actually should reflect the server timezone. It doesn't know anything about the end-user's timezone. – rmobis
Thats odd because my server stores as my local time. – ambe5960
Did you edit the timezone option on config/app.php? – rmobis
What does time(); give you? – AStopher
Hey, I just checked my phpinfo(), and the time zone was wrong. So I will change it in my php.ini file, and I am sure it will solve the issue. Thanks a bunch for the help! – ambe5960

4 Answers

11
votes

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.

17
votes

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

6
votes

Change your time zone in config/app.php

 'timezone' => 'YOUR TIME ZONE',
0
votes

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.