Vagrant tips: How to automatically adjust the Time Zone of your vagrant box

Intro

I was playing with my Linux vagrant boxes lately and I realized I was always spinning third party boxes that had a totally different time zone (Europe/UK mostly). Up until now I never bothered as I have used bunch of those from vagrant Cloud for years. I sometimes notice, and think of using a shell command to fix it during the bootstrap, but it I haven’t had the time. However, I was heavily debugging some logs this week and the wrong Time Zone started to get annoying for me so I decided to look for a permanent fix. 

I. Vagrant Time zone plugin to the rescue 

• Solution

  There is no need to add random shell script in the shell provisioning area of your Vagrantfile.Teemu Matilainen has you covered with his sweet ruby plugin called  vagrant-timezone that does just that.
       

  
  

• How does it work
  Install the plugin:

C:\Users\brokedba>  vagrant plugin install vagrant-timezone
Installing the 'vagrant-timezone' plugin. This can take a few minutes...
Fetching vagrant-timezone-1.3.0.gem
Installed the plugin 'vagrant-timezone (1.3.0)'!


►  Configuration


To Configure time zone for all Vagrant VMs, add the following to $HOME/.vagrant.d/Vagrantfile or to a project specific Vagrantfile (see below example in windows)

C:\Users\brokedba\.vagrant.d>vagrant init
--- Add the IF block below in the master or each build’s Vagrantfile
 
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  if Vagrant.has_plugin?("vagrant-timezone")
    config.timezone.value = "America/Toronto"
  end
  # ... other stuff
end

You can of course choose your own Time Zone from this TZ database list   

- The configuration is done on vagrant up and vagrant reload actions. 
    Note that no services are restarted automatically so they may keep using the old time zone information.    

- This plugin requires Vagrant 1.2 or newer.










• 
  

  

II. Usage and prerequisites

III. Compatibility

• Linux guests.
  • Arch
  • CoreOS
  • Debian (and derivatives)
  • Gentoo
  • RedHat (and derivatives)

• BSD guests:

  • FreeBSD
  • NetBSD
  • OpenBSD
  • OS X

• Windows

Conclusion:

This will hopefully encourage you to more often use and enjoy vagrant boxes without being stuck with the original time zone .

Thanks for reading