Today I had to setup the timezone on a couple of Ubuntu servers. I thought it would be a good idea to write a short article about it. So here we go 🤓

Setting the timezone on Ubuntu is pretty easy. You can do it with the timedatectl command.

First you should check the current timezone with the following command:

timedatectl

# output - look for "Time zone"
               Local time: Sa 2024-06-01 01:06:51 CEST
           Universal time: Fr 2024-05-31 23:06:51 UTC
                 RTC time: Sa 2024-06-01 01:06:51
                Time zone: Europe/Vienna (CEST, +0200)
System clock synchronized: yes
              NTP service: active
          RTC in local TZ: yes

In this case the timezone is set to Europe/Vienna. If you want to change it you can do it with the following command:

sudo timedatectl set-timezone Europe/Berlin

After that you should see the new timezone with the timedatectl command:

timedatectl

# output - look for "Time zone"
               Local time: Sa 2024-06-01 01:09:32 CEST
           Universal time: Fr 2024-05-31 23:09:32 UTC
                 RTC time: Sa 2024-06-01 01:09:32
                Time zone: Europe/Berlin (CEST, +0200)
System clock synchronized: yes
              NTP service: active
          RTC in local TZ: yes

If you are not sure what timezone you can get a list of available timezones with the following command:

timedatectl list-timezones

That's it. Now you know how to set the timezone on an Ubuntu server 🎉