Question

I’m trying to install a PHP application on my server. But I’m getting this error:

Warning: putenv() [function.putenv]:
Safe Mode warning: Cannot set
environment variable ‘PHP_TZ’ – it’s
not in the allowed list in
…/public/timezone.inc on line 14

I’ve located the offending file and section of code (below). How would I fix this code? What is PHP_TZ supposed to do? Why doesn’t PHP like it? What can I do instead?

//set the timezone
if ($configdata["timezone"] != "") {
    putenv("PHP_TZ=" . stripslashes($configdata["timezone"]));
    putenv("TZ=" . stripslashes($configdata["timezone"]));

    //for >= PHP 5.1
    if(function_exists("date_default_timezone_set")) {
        date_default_timezone_set($configdata["timezone"]);
    }

I’m on PHP 5.2.10. I tried both ‘Europe/Zurich’, and ‘UTC’ for the values for $configdata[“timezone”] and got the same error for both.

Answer 1

PHP_TZ stands for PHP Timezone.

Since the version 5.1 you need to set it through the date_default_timezone_set function or from your PHP configuration. From the documentation :

Note:

Since PHP 5.1.0 (when the date/time functions were rewritten), every call to a date/time function will generate a E_NOTICE if the timezone isn’t valid, and/or a E_WARNING message if using the system settings or the TZ environment variable.

The easiest fix you could do is the following.

//set the timezone
if ($configdata["timezone"] != "") {
    //for >= PHP 5.1
    if(function_exists("date_default_timezone_set")) {
        date_default_timezone_set($configdata["timezone"]);
    // for PHP < 5.1
    } else {
        putenv("PHP_TZ=" . stripslashes($configdata["timezone"]));
        putenv("TZ=" . stripslashes($configdata["timezone"]));
    }
}