How can I set Timezone in lumen 5.2?

In Lumen 5.2 the Application class actually reads from a APP_TIMEZONE environment variable.

You can easily set timezone via a .env file using or setting the environment variable on your server:

APP_TIMEZONE=UTC

None of the responses I've read in a lot of forums solves the problem, because in the file /vendor/laravel/lumen-framework/config/database.php there is this line:

'mysql' => [
            'driver'    => 'mysql',
            'host'      => env('DB_HOST', 'localhost'),
            'port'      => env('DB_PORT', 3306),
            'database'  => env('DB_DATABASE', 'forge'),
            'username'  => env('DB_USERNAME', 'forge'),
            'password'  => env('DB_PASSWORD', ''),
            'charset'   => env('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8'),
            'collation' => env('DB_COLLATION', 'utf8_unicode_ci'),
            'prefix'    => env('DB_PREFIX', ''),
            **'timezone'  => env('DB_TIMEZONE', '+00:00'),**
            'strict'    => env('DB_STRICT_MODE', false),
        ],

You need to rewrite this config file. Create a database.php file in config folder. Then copy all the content without the timezone line. This works for me.

This is pretty easily done and shown in their documentation page:

To set configuration values at runtime, pass an array to the config helper:

config(['app.timezone' => 'America/Chicago']);

Alternatively, in app/config.php:

'timezone' => 'UTC',