Timezones in Laravel 4

Here's something cool I didn't know about timezones in Laravel 4 - instead of just providing an offset from UTC you can use the default timezones as provided by PHP.

In your config/app.php file, you've got the following setting by default:

/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Application Timezone
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| Here you may specify the default timezone for your application, which
| will be used by the PHP date and date-time functions. We have gone
| ahead and set this to a sensible default for you out of the box.
|
*/

'timezone' => 'UTC',

Instead of UTC you can simply substitute any of the PHP supported timezones. For example, a few of the apps I've worked on have Australia/Sydney to keep all the times localised here, even through daylight savings.

Of course, if you really wanted you could go ahead and place a call to date_default_timezone_set() somewhere in your app boot, but this is build cleanly into Laravel.