A month ago I set up a new server with Ubuntu 22 for a client, replacing an old one that had Ubuntu 18, which I upgraded to Ubuntu 20. The server has about tqo dozen scripts that I've developed and supported for the last six years. He's very happy with the setup.

However, I've been having some challenges with time zones with the new server. I did specify the Eastern (America/Toronto) time zone during installation, and this appeared to work (when logged in as a regular user), until I noticed that cron jobs were running at UTC time. Eventually I figured out I had to set the system time zone (see this post on Mastodon) using timedatectl set-timezone America/Toronto. There's still one script that was mis-behaving, though. The log file showed that the time period is was fetching transactions was correct .. 

2024/06/03 07:02:02 INFO : Starting date is 2024-05-27 00:00:00 EDT
2024/06/03 07:02:02 INFO : Ending date is   2024-05-28 00:00:00 EDT

[download]
But the epoch values that were being used 
..created[gte]=1716782400&created[lt]=1716868800

[download]
were UTC. ?!??!?

Naturally, I went back to the documentation at DateTime and saw that for the epoch method, it returns ".. the UTC epoch value for the datetime object." This is confusing to me, since I'm expecting an epoch value in the selected time zone. Those epoch values are four hours later than what I want, and this is messing things up for my client -- this code has worked fine for ~6 years, but is now broken.

I'm not asking for a fix (I know what I need to do), I'm just asking whether some concept was adjusted somewhere. Thanks.

Alex / talexb / Toronto

Thanks PJ. We owe you so much. Groklaw -- RIP -- 2003 to 2013.

In reply to SOLVED: DateTime's epoch method returns UTC value? by talexb

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