Fixing Wrong Timezone in Docker Logs

I had this issue of my running container logs is using UTC as its timezone, which will make troubleshooting process quite troublesome.

After some experiment, I found that we have to set the timezone early when we run the container, to make the logs recorded in the timezone we prefer.

For currently running container, the safest way is to commit it to image, and rerun a new container based on that image.

1. My current container's logs

$ docker logs mycontainer

...

2021-03-09 12:01:08.939 UTC [1283819] WARNING:  terminating connection because of crash of another server process

...

2. Back up the current container to an image called mycontainer-backup:20210310

$ docker commit mycontainer mycontainer-backup:20210310

3. Stop the current container, to avoid port clash (if any)

$ docker stop mycontainer

4. Run a new container, based of the backup image, this time we need to specify the timezone variable

$ docker run -dit --name mynewcontainer -e TZ=Asia/Kuala_Lumpur mycontainer-backup:20210310

5. Done, we can verify the log's timezone, just to be sure

$ docker logs mynewcontainer

...

2021-03-10 08:03:14.429 +08 [1] LOG:  listening on IPv4 address "0.0.0.0",

...