How to set timezone dynamically and globally in Laravel ?

Laravel stores timezone configurations in config/app.php file and we can easily set timezone dynamically and globally in Laravel. Laravel usage carbon library to get the current date time and format, carbon also respects the timezone defined in config/app.php file. After php 5, php also introduced DateTime class to conduct the operations of date time related functionality.

So in this article i will show you multiple ways to set the timezone for global application as well runtime dynamically so that we can set the time zone in all ways according to our requirements.

This example will work in all version of laravel including laravel 5, laravel 6, laravel 7, laravel 8 and laravel 9. In example we will show date and time with Carbon, DateTime class and core php date() function.

We will cover below methods

1. Globally Timezone using config/app.php
2. Set Timezone dynamically using date_default_timezone_set of php
3. Set Timezone using DateTimeZone class

Also Read : How to Change Date Format in Laravel ?

Let’s begin the tutorial of set timezone dynamically and globally in Laravel we can use as follow

Method 1 : Set Timezone Gloabally in config/app.php

In this method we will set timezone in config/app.php file globally so we will get the datetime everywhere in given timezone as follow

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Facade;
  
return [
      .....
      'timezone' => 'Asia/Kolkata',
      .....
];

Now if we will use the Date Time functions of laravel then it will return the India time in controller as follow

<?php
  
namespace App\Http\Controllers;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use Carbon\Carbon;
  
class DateTimeController extends Controller
{
     
    public function index(Request $request)
    {
        $now = Carbon::now();
            
        return $now;
    }
}

We can also set this timezone in .env file

APP_TIMEZONE='Asia/Kolkata'

then in app/config.php file

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Facade;
  
return [
      .....
      'timezone' => env('APP_TIMEZONE','UTC'),
      .....
];

Method 2 : Set Timezone dyanmically using date_default_timezone_set of php

In this method we will use date_default_timezone_set() core php function as follow

<?php
  
namespace App\Http\Controllers;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use Carbon\Carbon;
  
class DateTimeController extends Controller
{
    
    public function index(Request $request)
    {
        date_default_timezone_set('Asia/Kolkata');
        $now = Carbon::now();
            
        return $now;
    }
}

We can also set this time zone in middleware so you can also create Custom middleware in laravel and then define as follow

<?php

namespace App\Http\Middleware;

use Closure;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;

class SetTimeZone
{
    
    public function handle(Request $request, Closure $next)
    { 
       //fetch records from database
        // $timezone =  User::find(1)->timezone;

        date_default_timezone_set('Asia/Kolkata');
        return $next($request);
    }
}

Here we can get the timezone from database and set it to globally for specific user.

Method 3 : Set Timezone using DateTimeZone class

In this method we will use DateTimeZone() class class as follow

$datetime = new DateTime();
$timezone = new DateTimeZone('Asia/Kolkata');
$datetime->setTimezone($timezone);
echo $datetime->format('F d, Y H:i');