Creating a UTC timezone date with PHP

Published on 2022-11-10 • Modified on 2022-11-10

This snippet shows how to create a UTC timezone date with PHP. The first thing to know is that if your server already has UTC as the default timezone (date.timezone = UTC in your php.ini file), you will get the correct date. If not, you must explicitly pass the UTC timezone to the DateTime constructor. CET stands for "Central European Time".

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<?php

declare(strict_types=1);

namespace App\Controller\Snippet;

/**
 * I am using a PHP trait to isolate each snippet in a file.
 * This code should be called from a Symfony controller extending AbstractController (as of Symfony 4.2)
 * or Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Controller\Controller (Symfony <= 4.1).
 * Services are injected in the main controller constructor.
 */
trait Snippet230Trait
{
    public function snippet230(): void
    {
        $dateUtc = new \DateTime('now', new \DateTimeZone('UTC'));
        $dateParis = new \DateTime('now', new \DateTimeZone('Europe/Paris'));

        echo 'UTC datetime: '.$dateUtc->format(\DateTimeInterface::RFC850).PHP_EOL;
        echo 'Paris datetime: '.$dateParis->format(\DateTimeInterface::RFC850);

        // That's it! 😁
    }
}

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