Dealing with PHP 5.3 Timezone Errors

PHP 5.3 requires that the timezone setting be set within PHP, and will not use the system timezone settings. The warning that occurs may look similar to the following:

<syntaxhighlight lang="bash"> Warning: strftime() [function.strftime]: 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. </syntaxhighlight>

There are two ways to handle this. Either edit the local php.ini file, or edit the index.php file.

Edit your local php.ini file

Locate your local php.ini file, and add the following line to it:

<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">date.timezone = "America/Detroit"</syntaxhighlight>

More details on custom php.ini files can be found here:

How can I change PHP settings?

Edit your index.php file

Add the following line to your index.php file, just under the php tag near the top of the file:

<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">date_default_timezone_set('America/Detroit'); </syntaxhighlight>

Locating your local TimeZone name

You can find the official name of your timezone by visiting the PHP website:

Timezones at php.net