Start Node Process In Specific Timezone

When running a node process on your machine locally, it will adopt your machine's local timezone.

I can observe this by starting a node process and outputting a date with toLocaleString().

> new Date().toLocaleString()
'11/30/2020, 8:48:17 PM'

This is the time that I'm writing this post, in Chicago (CST).

I can then start the process in another timezone, such as UTC.

$ TZ=utc node

With that node process, I can now do the same experiment.

> new Date().toLocaleString()
'12/1/2020, 2:52:40 AM'

The time jumps ahead about 6 hours because it is going from CST (UTC-6) to UTC.

Similarly, I could start the Node process for the west coast like so,

$ TZ='America/Los_Angeles' node