"date(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings..."

Question

I got this error when I requested to update the PHP version from 5.2.17 to PHP 5.3.21 on the server.

<div style="border:1px solid #990000;padding-left:20px;margin:0 0 10px 0;">

<h4>A PHP Error was encountered</h4>

<p>Severity: Warning</p>
<p>Message:  date(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'America/New_York' for 'EDT/-4.0/DST' instead</p>
<p>Filename: libraries/Log.php</p>
<p>Line Number: 86</p>

</div>
Warning: date(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'America/New_York' for 'EDT/-4.0/DST' instead in /filelocation right here/system/libraries/Log.php on line 86

Warning: date(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'America/New_York' for 'EDT/-4.0/DST' instead in /filelocation right here/system/libraries/Log.php on line 99
<div style="border:1px solid #990000;padding-left:20px;margin:0 0 10px 0;">

<h4>A PHP Error was encountered</h4>

<p>Severity: Warning</p>
<p>Message:  date(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'America/New_York' for 'EDT/-4.0/DST' instead</p>
<p>Filename: libraries/Log.php</p>
<p>Line Number: 99</p>

</div>

Answer 1

You probably need to put the timezone in a configuration line in your php.ini file. You should have a block like this in your php.ini file:

[Date]
; Defines the default timezone used by the date functions
; http://php.net/date.timezone
date.timezone = America/New_York

If not, add it (replacing the timezone by yours). After configuring, make sure to restart httpd (service httpd restart).

Here is the list of supported timezones.