Manage Timezones in Laravel (UTC to User’s timezone)

Option 1 — Change on front-end: (Preferred)

The idea is that you always stored your time in UTC in database and then you convert it on front-end; it’s nothing specific to Laravel. Suppose a user registers in London, travel to New York and then come back. In New York we don’t want to present him/her with London time right! So what we do is we query the DB, and change on the front-end. You can make a mixin in Vue or utility function in React like so:

import moment from 'moment'

const timeConverter = {
  utcToLocal: (timestamp, format = 'YYYY-MM-DD') => {
    return moment.unix(timestamp).local().format(format)
  },
  localToUTC: (timestamp, format = 'YYYY-MM-DD') => {
    return moment(timestamp).utc().format(format)
  },
}

export default timeConverter

Option 2— Change on back-end:

Bonus:

https://github.com/brainlet-ali/laravel-convert-timezone

If front-end conversion is not an option for you then read on.

Step 1:

Simply take the user time zone at the time of registration and stored it in users table like so:

<select name="tz" class="form-control m-input"
        required>
    <option selected value="">
        Select
    </option>
    @foreach (timezone_identifiers_list() as $timezone)
        <option value="{{ $timezone }}">{{ $timezone }}</option>
    @endforeach
</select>
...
   $attributes['tz'] = request('tz'); 
   User::create($attributes);
...

Step 2:

Make a trait which will converts the time from UTC to User’s timezone (act as accessor):

trait SetTimeZone
{
  public $tz = 'UTC';
public function getTz(){
    $this->tz = auth()->user()->tz;
  }

  public function getCreatedAtAttribute($value){
    try {
       return (new Carbon($value))->setTimezone(new CarbonTimeZone($this->getTz()));
    } catch (\Exception $e) {
       return 'Invalid DateTime Exception: '.$e->getMessage();
    }        
  }
public function getUpdatedAtAttribute($value){
    try {
       return (new Carbon($value))->setTimezone(new CarbonTimeZone($this->getTz()));
    } catch (\Exception $e) {
       return 'Invalid DateTime Exception: '.$e->getMessage();
    }        
  }
}
____________________________________________________________________
class MyModel extends Model
{
    use SetTimeZone;

   ...
}

At this point you will have UTC to user’s timezone conversion out of the box; BUT when you query the database for ranges it’ll be in UTC right?

To get around this we’ll be using CONVERT_TZ (MySQL) a built-in function so that our query fetches the results keeping the users timezone into account.

YOUR_MODEL::whereRaw("CONVERT_TZ(field.updated_at, '+00:00', '{$tzOffset}') BETWEEN '{$startDate}' AND '{$endDate}'")

You can get the off set timezone difference using:

$tzOffset =
Carbon::createFromTimestamp(0, auth()->user()->tz)->getOffsetString()

NOTE: Carbon::now() is tricky when querying the database.

Use Carbon::now() OR Carbon::today() passing in the user timezone, otherwise it will query using UTC and that’s something you may not want.

Vola !! have a good day.