“date(): It is not safe to rely on the system'

Question

I got this error when I requested to update the PHP version from 5.2.17 to PHP 5.3.21 on the server.

<div style="border:1px solid #990000;padding-left:20px;margin:0 0 10px 0;">

<h4>A PHP Error was encountered</h4>

<p>Severity: Warning</p>
<p>Message:  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/New_York' for 'EDT/-4.0/DST' instead</p>
<p>Filename: libraries/Log.php</p>
<p>Line Number: 86</p>

</div>
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 'America/New_York' for 'EDT/-4.0/DST' instead in /filelocation right here/system/libraries/Log.php on line 86

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 'America/New_York' for 'EDT/-4.0/DST' instead in /filelocation right here/system/libraries/Log.php on line 99
<div style="border:1px solid #990000;padding-left:20px;margin:0 0 10px 0;">

<h4>A PHP Error was encountered</h4>

<p>Severity: Warning</p>
<p>Message:  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/New_York' for 'EDT/-4.0/DST' instead</p>
<p>Filename: libraries/Log.php</p>
<p>Line Number: 99</p>

</div>

Answer 1

This answer above from CtrlX is the correct answer, but it may not work completely. I added this line to my php.ini file:

date.timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

but it did not remove the PHP error for all my files because some of my PHP scripts are in subfolders. So I had to edit .htaccess file to setup php.ini to be used recursively (in subfolders):

suphp_configpath /home/account_name/public_html

where account_name is your cpanel account name and public_html is the folder your php.ini file is in.

Answer 2

If these are not your options

• Modifying php.ini.
• Adding date_default_timezone call.

Instead of date you could use gmdate.

I have used gmdate( "Y" ) when I needed a year for a copyright snipplet.

Answer 3

A simple method for two time zone.

<?php 
$date = new DateTime("2012-07-05 16:43:21", new DateTimeZone('Europe/Paris')); 

date_default_timezone_set('America/New_York'); 

echo date("Y-m-d h:iA", $date->format('U')); 

// 2012-07-05 10:43AM 
?>