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Abayomi Ogunnusi
Abayomi Ogunnusi

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Time Zone: Nodejs

I've faced a lot of obstacles while developing web apps, but I've never had to deal with time zone issues.
I decided to write this brief post to help anyone who might find themselves in the same situation.
The solution was discovered thanks to the help of a colleague.

timezone

After writing the logic for a service apartment booking app check site here, I discovered that the email was not sending the correct time in the booking receipt. I live in Africa, Nigeria to be precise yet the time zone supplied to the user after a successful booking was eastern standard time i.e the previous day to my current time. In my case:
Fri Dec 17 2021 to Sat Dec 18 2021 instead of Sat Dec 18 2021 to Sun Dec 19 2021
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✅ The quick fix was:

const express = require('express');
const app = express();
const port = process.env.PORT || 4545

process.env.TZ ="Africa/Lagos"

...

app.listen(port, () => {
    console.log(`Server Established and  running on Port ⚡${port}`)
})

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Conclusion

You can easily set your time zone to a correct value by using process.env.TZ ="Continent/Country". I hope this post was helpful. Thanks for reading.

Top comments (5)

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drsimplegraffiti profile image
Abayomi Ogunnusi

@mandraketech noted and thanks for the contribution

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Navneet Karnani

The cleaner fix would have been to set the TZ environment on the machine where you were running this process. That would make it apply systemwide.

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drsimplegraffiti profile image
Abayomi Ogunnusi • Edited

@rawas_aditya glad you found it helpful

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Abayomi Ogunnusi

@dirkecker You are welcome

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Aditya Rawas

whats a timing i was just looking for this one