How to get Unix timestamp in php based on timezone

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time

Unix time, or POSIX time, is a system for describing instants in time, defined as the number of seconds elapsed since midnight Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) of Thursday, January 1, 1970

The unix timestamp isn't affected by a timezone setting. Setting the timezone only affects the interpretation of the timestamp value.

The answer provided by Volkerk (that says timestamps are meant to be always UTC based) is correct, but if you really need a workaround (to make timezone based timestamps) look at my example.

<?php

//default timezone
$date = new DateTime(null);
echo 'Default timezone: '.$date->getTimestamp().'<br />'."\r\n";

//America/New_York
$date = new DateTime(null, new DateTimeZone('America/New_York'));
echo 'America/New_York: '.$date->getTimestamp().'<br />'."\r\n";

//Europe/Amsterdam
$date = new DateTime(null, new DateTimeZone('Europe/Amsterdam'));
echo 'Europe/Amsterdam: '.$date->getTimestamp().'<br />'."\r\n";

echo 'WORK AROUND<br />'."\r\n";
// WORK AROUND
//default timezone
$date = new DateTime(null);
echo 'Default timezone: '.($date->getTimestamp() + $date->getOffset()).'<br />'."\r\n";

//America/New_York
$date = new DateTime(null, new DateTimeZone('America/New_York'));
echo 'America/New_York: '.($date->getTimestamp() + $date->getOffset()).'<br />'."\r\n";

//Europe/Amsterdam
$date = new DateTime(null, new DateTimeZone('Europe/Amsterdam'));
echo 'Europe/Amsterdam: '.($date->getTimestamp() + $date->getOffset()).'<br />'."\r\n";
?>

Get the regular timestamp and add the UTC offset

Had the same issue myself, and this is the easiest approach I could do fairly quickly.

$dateTimeZone = new DateTimeZone("America/New_York");
$dateTime = new DateTime("now", $dateTimeZone);
$timeOffset = $dateTimeZone->getOffset($dateTime);

// New time since epoch according to timezone
$newTime = time() + $timeOffset;

echo date("H:i:s", $newTime);