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It is very important to set your server's time and timezone correct to ensure that your application or services work seamlessly with accurate timestamps. In this tutorial we will show you how to configure and set the timezone on an Ubuntu 18.04 server.

Step 1 Get the list of timezones

timedatectl list-timezones

Step 2 Set the timezone

sudo timedatectl set-timezone America/New_York (replace America/New_York with your preferred timezone)

If you work with GPS Trackers and are setting up a GPS Tracking or IOT server that will collect data from multiple IOT devices or trackers, most trackers requires the timezone for your server to be set to UTC you can do so with the following command.

sudo timedatectl set-timezone UTC

Step 3 Verify or check the timezone that has been set

timedatectl

Example Output:

root@server:~# timedatectl
                      Local time: Thu 2020-07-23 21:30:05 UTC
                  Universal time: Thu 2020-07-23 21:30:05 UTC
                        RTC time: Thu 2020-07-23 21:30:06
                       Time zone: UTC (UTC, +0000)
       System clock synchronized: yes
systemd-timesyncd.service active: yes
                 RTC in local TZ: no

Additionally you can also enable NTP Synchronization by running the following commands

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install ntp