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Best Practices: Setting Time Zones for Lemmy on Docker (lemmy.ninja)

submitted 1 year ago by RotaryKeyboard@lemmy.ninja to c/lemmy_support@lemmy.ml

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I'm wondering: where does Lemmy UI get the timezone for the time stamp on posts?

We are using Lemmy in docker. Two of the five containers in the stack have tzdata, and all of them are set to UTC right now. But when I hover over a post's relative time stamp to get the precise time it was posted, I was surprised to see UTC -6.

I'm in UTC -6, and the host that the docker stack is running on is currently set to UTC -6.

Basically, I can go to all the trouble to set the env in docker-compose to set the correct time zone for the containers, but I'm wondering if I need to bother. Any feedback would be helpful as far as best practices for setting time zones to make posts have the right time stamp and for making logs readable.

Thanks in advance!

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[–] foo@withachanceof.com 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'd have to look at the code to be sure, but I'd guess it converts the timestamp into the browser's timezone. You could test this by changing the timezone on your computer and seeing how Lemmy displays it.

At least that's how I'd build it. Keeping backend times in UTC and then converting on the frontend to the user's set timezone is generally a best practice. Using non-UTC times on servers is just asking for trouble.