How to Manage App Server's Time Zone
Validated on 6 Oct 2023 • Last edited on 6 May 2025
App Platform is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering that allows developers to publish code directly to DigitalOcean servers without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.
App servers are set to use the UTC time zone by default. You can change your app server’s time zone by declaring a TZ environment variable and setting the value to a TZ identifier from the tz database.
For example, to set a server’s time zone to West Africa, declare a variable with the key TZ and set its value to Africa/Lagos.
To verify that the time zone has changed, click your app’s Console tab and then run the date command in the console. The command returns the current time in the server’s current time zone.
If you use your own container image, make sure it includes the tzdata package. Without it, changing the TZ environment variable has no effect.
App Platform does not currently support changing time zones for build and runtime logs, which are displayed in UTC.