Can't set default timezone in PHP

Question

I've set this in my php.ini file, and restarted php5-fpm process

date.timezone = "UTC"

But phpinfo() script still shows this:

date.timezone   America/New_York    America/New_York

phpinfo() also shows that correct ini file is being used.

I've restarted - but problem persisted. Then I did:

sudo service nginx stop
sudo service apache2 start

and date.timezone is correct when mod-php (apache2) is in use instead of fcgi that is php in nginx.

Answer 1

In my installation BY DEFAULT I had realy weird configuration. File /etc/php/7.3/fpm/pool.d/www.conf had such a setting at the end of the file

php_admin_value[date.timezone] = UTC

It lead to timezone setting being ignored in php.ini and default system timezone being ignored.

Answer 2

The problem seems to be be with php-fpm processes that lingers around and refers to the old php.ini file settings. This worked for me:

Get the process ids for php-fpm

root@thiru:/etc/php5/fpm/conf.d# ps aux | head -1 && ps aux | grep php-fpm | grep -v grep
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root     32650  0.0  0.5  86624 17032 ?        Ss   21:44   0:00    php-fpm: master process (/etc/php5/fpm/php-fpm.conf)                    
www-data 32652  0.0  0.1  86624  4700 ?        S    21:44   0:00 php-fpm: pool www                                                       
www-data 32653  0.0  0.1  86624  4704 ?        S    21:44   0:00 php-fpm: pool www   

Kill the processes. Starting with the master.

kill -9 32650
kill -9 32652
kill -9 32653

Start php-fpm using the init script

service php5-fpm start or /etc/init.d/php5-fpm start

Answer 3

You probably edited the wrong php.ini. See php_info() (or php -i for the cli interpreter) which one is used. For example on ubuntu (and probably other linux distributions) its /etc/php5/cli/php.ini for the cli-interpreter, /etc/php5/apache/php.ini/ for the one used by Apaches mod_php and /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini used by php5-cgi (which is used by nginx).

Answer 4

List of supported timezone values: http://php.net/timezones