[php] "date(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings..."

I got this error when I requested to update the PHP version from 5.2.17 to PHP 5.3.21 on the server.

<div style="border:1px solid #990000;padding-left:20px;margin:0 0 10px 0;">

<h4>A PHP Error was encountered</h4>

<p>Severity: Warning</p>
<p>Message:  date(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'America/New_York' for 'EDT/-4.0/DST' instead</p>
<p>Filename: libraries/Log.php</p>
<p>Line Number: 86</p>

</div>
Warning: date(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'America/New_York' for 'EDT/-4.0/DST' instead in /filelocation right here/system/libraries/Log.php on line 86

Warning: date(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'America/New_York' for 'EDT/-4.0/DST' instead in /filelocation right here/system/libraries/Log.php on line 99
<div style="border:1px solid #990000;padding-left:20px;margin:0 0 10px 0;">

<h4>A PHP Error was encountered</h4>

<p>Severity: Warning</p>
<p>Message:  date(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'America/New_York' for 'EDT/-4.0/DST' instead</p>
<p>Filename: libraries/Log.php</p>
<p>Line Number: 99</p>

</div>

If you are using CodeIgniter and can't change php.ini, I added the following to the beginning of index.php:

date_default_timezone_set('GMT');

<? date_default_timezone_set('Europe/Istanbul'); ?>

For php (or your location).

I am hosting my EC2 and S3 bucket in us-west-2 (Oregon) region. When I was calling $s3client->listBuckets() to list existing buckets in my php, I was getting exception - "Uncaught exception 'Exception' with message 'DateTime::__construct(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings...". I made below changes to make it work. Sharing these details in case someone is facing similar issue and any of above answers have not helped.

1. Based on documentation @ AWS Configuring Network Time Protocol (NTP), I confirmed ntpd service status is fine by running ntpstat command. If you get error, this link helps you to know what is going wrong.
2. Opened /etc/php.ini file (some may have it in different path based on version of php installed) and found that date.timezone was not set to any value and also it was commented by default. I un-commented by removing ';' before this line and set its value to "UTC" and saved the file.
3. Restarted http and ntp daemons using sudo service httpd restart and sudo service ntpd restart commands.

After this I am able to list buckets successfully without any exception. Hope this helps.

A quick solution whilst your rectify the incompatibilities, is to disable error reporting in your index.php file:

Insert the line below into your index.php below define( ‘_JEXEC’, 1 );

error_reporting( E_ERROR | E_PARSE | E_CORE_ERROR | E_CORE_WARNING | E_COMPILE_ERROR |
E_COMPILE_WARNING );

In your connection page put a code like this date_default_timezone_set("Africa/Johannesburg"); based on your current location.

If you don't have access to the file php.ini, create or edit a .htaccess file in the root of your domain or sub and add this (generated by cpanel):

<IfModule mime_module>
AddType application/x-httpd-ea-php56 .php .php5 .phtml
</IfModule>

<IfModule php5_module>
php_value date.timezone "America/New_York"
</IfModule>

<IfModule lsapi_module>
php_value date.timezone "America/New_York"
</IfModule>

<? print(gmdate("Y")); ?> 

instead of

<? print(date("Y")); ?>

worked for me (shows current year and no more shows the error message). (Thanks to Chris above)

Add the following in your index.php file. I first came across this when I moved my application from my XAMPP server to Apache 2.2 and PHP 5.4...

I would advise you do it in your index.php file instead of the php.ini file.

if( ! ini_get('date.timezone') )
{
    date_default_timezone_set('GMT');
}

In my particular case, I have PHP configured to use PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager). When executing phpinfo() from CLI I saw correct timezone that I had set in the php.ini, however it was still incorrect in the browser and causing my code to fail. I simply needed to restart the php-fpm service on the server.

service rh-php56-php-fpm restart

You may also need to restart the httpd service if you edited the php.ini

service httpd restart

For docker user: Create a local timezone.ini file in your project, set up the config in docker-compose.yml,

    volumes:
        - "./docker/config/timezone.ini:/usr/local/etc/php/conf.d/timezone.ini"

timezone.ini

    date.timezone=Australia/Sydney

I had this error running php-fpm in a chroot jail. I tried creating etc/php.ini and /usr/share/zoneinfo in the chroot directory, but it just didn't work. I even tried strace-ing the php-fpm daemons to see what file they were missing - nothing jumped out.

So in case Google brings you here because you get this error when using php-fpm configured for chroot, you can probably fix it by adding this line to /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf in the ENV section:

env[TZ] = America/New_York

A php-fpm restart is normally required for it to take effect. Hope this helps somebody out there.

If you cannot modify your php.ini configuration, you could as well use the following snippet at the beginning of your code:

date_default_timezone_set('Africa/Lagos');//or change to whatever timezone you want

The list of timezones can be found at http://www.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php.

In addition to setting the date.timezone= as mentioned in several answers, I found an error in the php.ini file that was keeping it from getting to the date.timezone. The way I found it was by running php from the command line in a terminal. this caused an error to be reported at line 114. In my case I had uncommented a setting for displaying errors that had '|' between 2 values. It did not like it. I removed one of the values and the | and everything was good after that

You can set the timezone in your .htaccess file

php_value date.timezone UTC

@Justis pointed me to the right direction, but his code did not work for me. This did:

// set the default timezone if not set at php.ini
if (!date_default_timezone_get('date.timezone')) {
    // insert here the default timezone
    date_default_timezone_set('America/New_York');
}

Documentation: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.date-default-timezone-get.php

This solution is not only for those who does not have full system access. It is necessary for any script when you provide it to anyone else but you. You never know on what server the script will run when you distribute it to someone else.

This issue has been bugging me for SOME time as im trying to inject a "createbucket.php" script into composer and i keep being told my time-zone is incorrect.

In the end the only thing that fixed the issue was to: $ sudo nano /etc/php.ini

Search for timezone

[Date]
; Defines the default timezone used by the date functions
; http://www.php.net/manual/en/datetime.configuration.php#ini.date.timezone
date.timezone = UTC

Ensure you remove the ;

Then finally

$ sudo service httpd restart

And you'll be good to go :)

There are two options for the resolve this

First, change into the php.ini file and put default timezone

date.timezone = "America/New_York"

Once, you have set the timezone in php.ini restart the server

Secondly, Change the run time assign time zone based on your need

date_default_timezone_set('America/New_York');

A simple method for two time zone.

<?php 
$date = new DateTime("2012-07-05 16:43:21", new DateTimeZone('Europe/Paris')); 

date_default_timezone_set('America/New_York'); 

echo date("Y-m-d h:iA", $date->format('U')); 

// 2012-07-05 10:43AM 
?>

I always keep this line inside codeigniter's root index.php.So that my code works at any server

date_default_timezone_set('Asia/Dhaka');

List of Supported Timezones here

If these are not your options

• Modifying php.ini.
• Adding date_default_timezone call.

Instead of date you could use gmdate.

I have used gmdate( "Y" ) when I needed a year for a copyright snipplet.

If you using Plesk, try it, First, Open PHP Settings, at the bottom of page, change date.timezone from DEFAULT to UTC.

I had to put it in double quotes.

date_default_timezone_set("America/Los_Angeles"); // default time zone

This answer above from CtrlX is the correct answer, but it may not work completely. I added this line to my php.ini file:

date.timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

but it did not remove the PHP error for all my files because some of my PHP scripts are in subfolders. So I had to edit .htaccess file to setup php.ini to be used recursively (in subfolders):

suphp_configpath /home/account_name/public_html

where account_name is your cpanel account name and public_html is the folder your php.ini file is in.