Mattermost wrong localtime / timezone

wytia · April 26, 2020, 3:30pm

Hey there,

I noticed the other day that localtime within Mattermost App is UTC. Host ist running on CEST and so I had a difference of 2h. Checking inside the container I saw that /etc/localtime was pointing correctly to /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Berlin but the file didn’t exist.
As a workaround I copied /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Berlin from host into container and everything is fine now.

Someone should fix this in an updated container version. By the way, any chance that Mattermost App gets updated soon? Version in App Center (5.10) is rather old compared to current stable version (5.22).

fbartels · April 28, 2020, 9:35am

Hi @wytia,

as the Univention app does not modify timezone the behaviour you descript seems to come from the Ubuntu base image. This however did not affect the user facing timestamps in my test (as the ui converts them from utc to gmt + 2:00, the local timezone of the user).

Yes, I agree an update of the app would be nice. Ideally it should switch from the current base to the containers provided by Mattermost directly (and in the same action get rid of the bundled MariaDB installation).

If you want to provide a patch for the timezone thing or contribute to switching the container you can find the current sources of the app at https://stash.z-hub.io/projects/K4U/repos/mattermost/browse. I will do my best to review pull requests as early as possible and do testing and pushing towards Univention.

fbartels · May 1, 2020, 12:29pm

Since I had a bit of time I have just submitted an app update to bring Mattermost to 5.22.1. The app is already in the test appcenter. Feedback is appreciated.

wytia · May 5, 2020, 3:21am

Hi @fbartels,

thank you for your reply. Since I’m quite busy currently, I can’t promise to pull new Mattermost version and test. As soon as I have some spare time I’ll do it.

About the timezone I was a bit confused in the first place because in my user settings it defaults to set automatic. But I got some weired timezone displayed which I changed to Europe/Berlin. After that I switched back to automatic and Europe/Berlin was kept. So I guess it was just a small hiccup.