I've been having problems with this also, in particular with PHP being out of sync with my System and Laravel 5.1 (running on virtual server with apache 2.4 ubuntu 14.04 - this was causing very strange problems in the application

After seeing some posts on Stack, I set my timezone in app.php to 'Australia/Sydney', rather than UTC

then in command line on the server edited the php.ini file

sudo nano /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

un-comented out & added Australia/Sydney

date.timezone = Australia/Sydney

Clocks at least now are in sync, when I add a record to the database the date time is correct

You can add the following key to your mysql connection in the config:

 'options' => array(
                \PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND => 'SET time_zone = \'+00:00\''
            )

This example sets your PDO database connection to UTC. So if the database itself runs in another timezone, your app wil always get the timestamps as UTC.

thiver said:

You can add the following key to your mysql connection in the config:

'options' => array(
               \PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND => 'SET time_zone = \'+00:00\''
           )

This example sets your PDO database connection to UTC. So if the database itself runs in another timezone, your app wil always get the timestamps as UTC.

@thiver what other options do we have for mysql connection? where can I found the documention of the options?

The best way is to set 'timezone' for mysql connection in config/database.php

For example

        'mysql' => [
            'driver'    => 'mysql',
            'host'      => env('DB_HOST', 'localhost'),
            'database'  => env('DB_DATABASE', 'forge'),
            'username'  => env('DB_USERNAME', 'forge'),
            'password'  => env('DB_PASSWORD', ''),
            'charset'   => 'utf8',
            'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci',
            'prefix'    => '',
            'strict'    => false,
            'timezone'  => '+00:00'
        ],

in my.cnf i have timezone set to '+08:00'

You can test with the following query

SELECT TIMEDIFF(NOW(), UTC_TIMESTAMP);

From Mysql console, I see '08:00:00', and from Laravel app, i see ''00:00:00'.

I had an additional problem - my MySQL server didn't have timezone information installed, so I couldn't simply use the same timezone name as for my application, e.g. "Europe/London".

So I put this at the beginning of my config/database.php:

// Determine timezone for mysql.
$dateTimeZoneApp = new DateTimeZone(env('APP_TIMEZONE'));
$dateTimeZoneUtc = new DateTimeZone("UTC");
$dateTimeApp = new DateTime("now", $dateTimeZoneApp);
$dateTimeUtc = new DateTime("now", $dateTimeZoneUtc);

$hourOffset = round($dateTimeZoneApp->getOffset($dateTimeUtc) / 3600);
$offsetString = $hourOffset > 0
	? "+" . str_pad($hourOffset, 2, '0', STR_PAD_LEFT) . ":00"
	: "-" . str_pad($hourOffset, 2, '0', STR_PAD_LEFT) . ":00";

And now I have a timezone offset string, for instance "+02:00", that I can use like in @thiver's solution.

(Please note it doesn't account for offsets other than full hour, but could be modified to do so if necessary.)