Date and Time Handling in Doppar

Introduction

Doppar provides a robust and flexible system for working with dates and times, thanks to its integration with the Carbon library. However, understanding how timezones are managed—especially when using functions like now() or Carbon::now()—can be important when building applications that rely on accurate time data.

By default, Doppar uses UTC as the base timezone for datetime functions such as now() and Carbon::now().

This might be confusing at first glance if you return timezone as reponse because any calls to these methods will return the current time in UTC.

But don't worry—Doppar is designed to internally handle timezone conversions using the timezone set in your config/app.php configuration file

'timezone' => env('APP_TIMEZONE', 'UTC'),

Whenever you use dates for display, formatting, or storing them in databases, Doppar ensures they are correctly converted to or from the application's configured timezone.

Working with Carbon

Carbon is a popular PHP library for date and time manipulation, and it's seamlessly integrated into the Doppar. Whether you're retrieving the current time or manipulating dates, Carbon provides a consistent and elegant API.

When working within Doppar, you have multiple ways to create a Carbon instance representing the current time. Here are three equivalent approaches: Let's see the example. To know more about Carbon, see its oficial docs.

use Carbon\Carbon;

Carbon::now();
now();
app('timezone')->now();

All of these methods will return the same result — a Carbon instance with the current date and time.