createFromTimestamp does not respect the default timezone

[arokettu]

Hello,

I encountered an issue with the following code:

<?php

require __DIR__ . '/../vendor/autoload.php';

date_default_timezone_set('America/New_York');
$d = \Carbon\CarbonImmutable::createFromTimestamp(1710358665);
var_dump($d->format('c'));

Carbon version: 3.1.1

PHP version: 8.3.4

I expected to get:

string(25) "2024-03-13T15:37:45-04:00"

But I actually get:

string(25) "2024-03-13T19:37:45+00:00"

Thanks!

[arokettu]

All >= 3.0.0 are affected

[kylekatarnls]

Hello,

This is an expected breaking change. As timestamp is by nature UTC (it's the number of seconds since January 1st 1970 00:00 UTC), that's the reason why DateTime itself won't convert your object into New_York timezone if you do this with pure PHP:

date_default_timezone_set('America/New_York');
$d = new DateTime('@1710358665');
var_dump($d->format('c'));

Carbon 2 was incorrectly using date_default_timezone_get() and Carbon 3 is now aligning its behavior with DateTime parent class.

But you can still use it explicitly:
CarbonImmutable::createFromTimestamp(1710358665, date_default_timezone_get())

As a second note, I strongly recommend you always set default timezone to UTC and work with user/context timezone locally instead of globally.

[arokettu]

Then PHPdoc should be fixed too at least:

Create a Carbon instance from a timestamp and set the timezone (use default one if not specified).

and I would expect it to be documented somewhere as a breaking change

and what's the purpose of createFromTimestampUTC now?

[kylekatarnls]

createFromTimestampUTC is indeed strictly equivalent to createFromTimestamp without timezone parameter. If you pass a timezone as a second parameter, only createFromTimestamp can do, if you want UTC, then you can call createFromTimestampUTC for explictness.

I will change the documentation. This is indeed incorrect.