I discovered Heroku a few weeks ago. It's a great platform to deploy your apps, specially because of their Free plan which I've been using as dev env to work with my team remotely.
Lately I started working on a new project. On this particular project I rely on dates for most of the main operations. The app has a front-end built with Angular 5, and a back-end built with Node.js
Everything was working perfectly on my local environment, but when I deployed to Heroku all the date operations started to behave kind of random (spoilers: it wasn't random at all).
Well, here's the thing. I'm from Argentina, and I had the front-end deployed on a local server, but the back-end was on Heroku and the default region for new heroku apps is "us". So basically my front-end and back-end were on different time zones.
This is not the first time I deal with this kind of date issues (there aren't many local cloud services in my region) so I found the source of the problem almost immediately, and I wanted to share it with you in case you encounter a similar issue.
Luckily Heroku let's us change the timezone of our app simply by adding a new config var.
From the Heroku CLI
- Open the command shell
- Login to heroku
- Navigate to your app's directory
- Setup your TZ
heroku config:add TZ="America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires"
From the Heroku dashboard (web)
- Login into the Heroku dashboard from a browser
- Navigate to the app
- Click over the Settings tab
- Press the "Reveal Config Vars" button
- Set the key to "TZ" and the value to your timezone (E.g.: America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires)
- Press the Add button
How do I know which is the correct TZ value
Follow this link to see the complete list of time zones
Check the new TZ value
Use the following command to check the value of the new config var from Heroku CLI:
heroku config:get TZ
Latest comments (36)
Thanks Bro
thanx bro you save my life
Thank you very much! 👍
Thankyou so much this saved much of my time. You are awesome ;)
If I just add TZ config and I am doing something which requires system time will it use timezone set by using the TZ ?
Yes, that's how it usually works. I'm not sure if there are any specific cases where that's not the case.
For example, if you deploy a node.js app that does something like
var now = new Date()
, it will use the timezone you specified in your TZ config.Thanks for Posting this.
It really helped.
Time is a complex thing, and Paula you helped me out today. I never imagined it to be soo easy!
I'm glad, Monish!
Sos muy crack Pau
jajaja justo te iba a decir que no me habias dejado un comentario. Gracias, green mario.
Saved my little ar**!! Can't thank you enough Buddy!
2 years later and this article is STILL useful
Thanks Mattia, glad to hear that :)
I really was calculating times to adjust them, when I found this. I thought as regions are permanent timezones must be too. But huh. You saved me. Thanksss.
Thanks, just found it useful 😉👍
Thanks! Solved
Thank you men, It worked
Thank you so much