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Handling Daylight Saving Time in Cron Jobs
- Our business is located in Maine (same timezone as New York; we set clocks back one hour in the Fall and ahead one hour in the Spring)
- Server A uses ET (automatically adjusts to UTC-4 in the summer, and UTC-5 in the winter)
- Server B uses UTC (not affected by Daylight Saving Time) – we cannot control the timezone of this server
We want to ensure both servers are always referencing, figuratively, the same clock on the wall in Maine.
Here’s what we can do to make sure the timing of cron jobs on Server B (UTC) match the changing times of Server A (ET).
12345# Every day at 11:55pm EST (due to conditional, commands only run during Standard Time (fall/winter)55 4 * * * [ `TZ=America/New_York date +\%Z` = EST ] && php artisan scrub-db >/dev/null 2>&1# Every day at 11:55pm EDT (due to conditional, commands only run during Daylight Saving Time (spring/summer)55 3 * * * [ `TZ=America/New_York date +\%Z` = EDT ] && php artisan scrub-db >/dev/null 2>&1Only one of the php artisan scrub-db commands will execute, depending on the time of year.