angle-uparrow-clockwisearrow-counterclockwisearrow-down-uparrow-leftatcalendarcard-listchatcheckenvelopefolderhouseinfo-circlepencilpeoplepersonperson-fillperson-plusphoneplusquestion-circlesearchtagtrashx

How to set the timezone when using the Python Alpine Docker image

When using a Python Alpine Docker image we must add the tzdata package before we can set the timezone.

13 November 2019
In Docker
post main image
https://unsplash.com/@danielcgold

While writing an application on my Docker platform I hit an unexpected problem, yes, another one ... This was the first time that I had to show the time on a page of a website running on Docker and it appeared that the time was UTC instead of local time. In the code I was just using the normal Python calls to get the time:

import datetime

    ...
    now = datetime.datetime.now()
    hour = now.hour
    minute = now.minute

I live in The Netherlands and when it was 9:30 the time shown on the web page was 8:30. Why? Searching the internet showed that Docker images based on Ubuntu did not have this problem. It appeared the problem was with the Alpine Docker image, I am using the Python 3.6-alpine image. The size of this image is small but that is because they left out a lot! The solution consists of:

  1. Adding the tzdata package to the Docker image
  2. Setting the timezone in the Docker image

Adding the tzdata package is easy. I use Docker multi-stage builds so in the first stage we add tzdata. In the second stage we copy the zoneinfo directory from the first stage to the second stage. In the Dockerfile we also set the timezone:

FROM python:3.6-alpine as base
...
RUN apk add --update \
    ....
    tzdata \
    ...

FROM python:3.6-alpine
...
COPY --from=base /usr/share/zoneinfo /usr/share/zoneinfo
ENV TZ=Europe/Amsterdam

After these changes the correct time was shown in the page. The only drawback is that this adds another few MBs. 

Links / credits

Setting the timezone
https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Setting_the_timezone

Using local time in a Golang Docker container built from Scratch
https://medium.com/@mhcbinder/using-local-time-in-a-golang-docker-container-built-from-scratch-2900af02fbaf

Leave a comment

Comment anonymously or log in to comment.

Comments

Leave a reply

Reply anonymously or log in to reply.