Workaround for Symfony 2.1 composer.phar update timezone error

Problem:

Every time I run "php composer.phar update", I get an error similar to:

Warning: date_default_timezone_get(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'America/Los_Angeles' for 'PST/-8.0/no DST' instead in /path/to/symfony21/project/vendor/monolog/monolog/src/Monolog/Logger.php line 112

Script Sensio\Bundle\DistributionBundle\Composer\ScriptHandler::clearCache handling the post-update-cmd event terminated with an exception

[RuntimeException] An error occurred when executing the "'cache:clear --no-warmup'" command.

What's worse is that my php.ini file has a timezone already set. For instance, when I run the shell command "php -i | grep date.timezone", a timezone is produced, e.g. "date.timezone => America/Los_Angeles => America/Los_Angeles".

Workaround:

A quick workaround to this issue is to explicitly set a timezone in the app/console script. Open the app/console script in a text editor. In app/console, near the top (for instance, right before set_time_limit(0);), add the following line, replacing the example timezone from below with one of the valid PHP timezones found on the PHP docs page:

date_default_timezone_set('America/Los_Angeles');

When you save your changes to app/console and run "php composer.phar update" once more, it should now work.

Notes/Disclaimer:

This workaround isn't by any means an ideal fix, and it will affect the timezone of all Symfony2 commands run using the app/console script. (A fortunate side-effect, however, would be the workaround of timezone issues in other scripts using app/console.) This workaround may or may not also affect any scripts that try to upgrade app/console. To reverse this change, simply remove the "date_default_timezone_set" line you inserted into app/console. (Or even better, prior to modifying app/console, copy the old app/console script, rename the copy to app/console.old, and replace the script with the copy if you need to revert.) This workaround was tested with Symfony 2.1.3, PHP version 5.3.6 using MAMP 2.0.5 under OS X 10.7. Your mileage may vary with other versions.