AWS Lambda Timezone

Question

I've been searching for a while and can't find a definitive answer on that or any oficial documentation from AWS.

I have a Lambda function on which I need to get the current date according to my timezone, but I'm unsure on which premisses I may rely to do that, and as this is a critical app, I can't simply rely on a single test or empirical result.

I would expect that lambda functions follow the timezone of the AWS region that they are hosted in OR a unique timezone for any GMT 0, but couldn't confirm it anywhere.

Could anyone please clarify how this works and if possible also point to any official documentation about that? Also, any special concerns related to daylight saving time?

My Lambda function is written on NodeJS and what I've been doing locally (on my machine) to retrieve the current date time is using new Date().

Answer 1

Lambda time using the date object will return a date in UTC unix time

TZ – The environment's time zone (UTC).

To get a time in a specific timezone you can use moment-timezone.

Using Javascript Date().now():

var moment = require("moment-timezone"); moment(Date().now()).tz("America/Los_Angeles").format("DD-MM-YYYY"); 

or using new Date():

var moment = require("moment-timezone"); var date = new Date(); moment(date.getTime()).tz("America/Los_Angeles").format("DD-MM-YYYY"); 

You can change the moment .js format to whatever you require

Regarding daylight savings time, it is possible to detect it using isDST() method.