Change Time Zone on Ubuntu 20.04 | 18.04 With These Tips

Usually, you would set the correct time zone during the setup of your Ubuntu Server system. In case this did not happen or a mistake was made, there are some ways to change the time zone on Ubuntu systems using the command-line interface.

Just to be on the same page, a time zone refers to a designated area of the globe that observes a uniform standard time. They are usually set using country boundaries or regional boundaries within a country, especially for larger ones.

Confirm the Current Timezone

Run the following command:

$ date

Example Output:

Thu Jan 7 21:26:59 UTC 2021

The above command shows that this system is running in the UTC timezone.

The same can be achieved but with more detail by running:

$ timedatectl

The expected output is:

                      Local time: Thu 2021-01-07 21:29:05 UTC
                  Universal time: Thu 2021-01-07 21:29:05 UTC
                        RTC time: Thu 2021-01-07 21:29:06
                       Time zone: Etc/UTC (UTC, +0000)
       System clock synchronized: yes
systemd-timesyncd.service active: yes
                 RTC in local TZ: no

Now Let’s Change the Time Zone on Ubuntu 20.04

Option 1 – Using timedatectl

You can find all the available time zones on your system. That way you can know the correct one to pick out.

$ timedatectl list-timezones

Search for the preferred time zone name from the list then uses one of the following commands to set the new time zone on your system.

$ sudo timedatectl set-timezone "America/New_York"

The “America/New_York” portion of the above command without quotes is what was retrieved from the list. You can get a comprehensive time zone list here.

Option 2 – Using /etc/localtime

This is a more involving method and it’s a bit of a hack but nevertheless, it is an alternate option that you can use to change the time zone on Ubuntu.

First, rename the /etc/localtime file to keep it as a backup.

$ mv /etc/localtime /etc/localtime-backup

Change the symbolic link of the file to the correct time zone configuration file. Find out more about how to create symbolic links in Linux from this post here.

$ ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York /etc/localtime

That’s it. You can confirm the changes by running the timedatectl command again.

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