How to fix "It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings"

If you see one of following warnings when you run a PHP script:

• PHP Warning:  mktime(): 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 'Asia/Calcutta' for 'IST/5.0/no DST' instead in /opt/websites/www/sample.php on line 10
• PHP 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 'Asia/Calcutta' for 'IST/5.0/no DST' instead in  /opt/websites/www/sample.php on line 11

PHP Warning:  mktime(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings.
PHP Warning:  date(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings.

You can try following solutions:

Solution 01

1. Find your timezone settings

   (For Ubuntu)
   

   cat /etc/timezone 

   
   (For Fedora/CentOS/RedHat)
   

   cat /etc/sysconfig/clock 

   
   
    
   
   
   Figure:  Ubuntu 12.04 Terminal
   
   or simply select your timezone from http://php.net/manual/en/timezones.php

2. Find your php.ini file to edit

   (For Ubuntu)
   

   cat /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

   
   (For Fedora/CentOS/RedHat)
   

   cat /etc/php.ini

   
   or You can locate all php.ini files using
   

   locate php.ini

   
   
   

Edit php.ini

Now insert following date-time settings into php.ini (replace "Asia/Colombo" using your timezone settings)


[Date]
; Defines the default timezone used by the date functions
; http://php.net/date.timezone
date.timezone = Asia/Colombo

3. Restart Apache

   (For Ubuntu)

   /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

   or

   service apache2 restart

   (For Fedora/CentOS/RedHat)

   /etc/init.d/httpd restart

   or

   service httpd restart

   
   

Solution 02

1. Edit your php script

   if you are unable to access your php.ini, can set the default timezone at the beginning of your PHP scripts.
   

   <?php
   date_default_timezone_set("Asia/Colombo");