ETOOBUSY 🚀 minimal blogging for the impatient
Timezone notes
TL;DR
Setting that little timezone can be really upsetting!
Setting the timezone in my computer - including the Linux virtual machine - is pretty much straightforward. Is it equally easy… in the containers?
Dokku
Dokku relies on herokuish, which is ultimately based on Ubuntu:
herokuishuser@ebe0a6ba7bee:~$ cat /etc/os-release | grep PRETTY_NAME
PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS"
So… no big deal (let’s get rid of the prompt on the way…):
$ [ -n "${TZ+x}" ] || printf 'TZ is unset\n'
TZ is unset
$ date
Mon Jun 1 14:46:45 UTC 2020
$ perl -E 'say scalar localtime'
Mon Jun 1 14:46:58 2020
Variable TZ to the rescue:
$ TZ=Europe/Rome date
Mon Jun 1 16:47:53 CEST 2020
$ TZ=Europe/Rome perl -E 'say scalar localtime'
Mon Jun 1 16:48:13 2020
This is interesting, because we can control it directly inside the process (should we need it):
$ perl -E '$ENV{TZ} = "Europe/Rome"; say scalar localtime'
Mon Jun 1 16:48:36 2020
Beware the Docker Alpine!
It turns out that Alpine Linux in a Docker image (i.e. this image) is really tiny. So tiny that, by default, it does not support what we saw for herokuish:
$ date
Mon Jun 1 17:15:18 UTC 2020
$ TZ='Europe/Rome' date
Mon Jun 1 17:15:30 UTC 2020
This is easily addressed though, just install the tzdata package:
$ apk add --no-cache tzdata
fetch http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.8/main/x86_64/APKINDEX.tar.gz
fetch http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.8/community/x86_64/APKINDEX.tar.gz
(1/1) Installing tzdata (2020a-r0)
Executing busybox-1.28.4-r2.trigger
OK: 8 MiB in 14 packages
$ date
Mon Jun 1 15:21:50 UTC 2020
$ TZ=Europe/Rome date
Mon Jun 1 17:21:59 CEST 2020
And I guess this is it!