J.D. Hodges

If you recently upgraded to a newer version of PHP, like PHP 5.3, you may be getting some errors similar to this in your PHP scripts:

Warning: date() [function.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/Chicago’ for […]  instead in /var/www/999999.php on line 99

You can fix this on a per-script basis by adding:

date_default_timezone_set(‘America/Chicago’);

to the script in question (or to a PHP include that is loaded earlier in the script) and this should fix the error for that particular script.

However, a more thorough solution is to define the timezone in your php.ini file. For example, on Gentoo your php.ini file may be located here:

/etc/php/apache2-php5.3/php.ini

and look for the section similar to:

; Defines the default timezone used by the date functions
; http://php.net/date.timezone
date.timezone = ‘America/Chicago’

the “date.timezone” may be commented out with a “;” but you can simply remove the semicolon and then add the correct timezone. An Apache reboot may or may not be required after this point.

This should resolve your issue for ALL php scripts that you may run on that server.

More discussion on the topic:

Gentoo Forums :: View topic – apache / php errorhttp://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-887960-start-0.html

Linux: phpinfo() system’s timezone error date.timezonehttp://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/unix-phpinfo-it-isnot-safeto-rely-on-systems-timezone-settings/Previous post: Explains: Linux linux-gate.so.1 Library / Dynamic Shared Object [ vdso ] Next post: Linux / UNIX: Software Update Vs Upgrade – What’s the Difference?

PHP: date_default_timezone_set – Manualhttp://php.net/manual/en/function.date-default-timezone-set.phpdate_default_timezone_set (PHP 5 >= 5.1.0)date_default_timezone_set — Sets the default timezone used by all date/time functions in a script

PS and here is a list of all the PHP American timezone cities 🙂