当部署在Amazon Web Services上时，如何在ExpressJS应用中获取浏览器时区？

Question

I've built a small chat room app using Express JS that I deployed on an AWS EC2 instance. When I developed the app, I was able to grab a local date from my machine to use to generate time stamps in the chat window. However, now that I've deployed my machine to AWS, the time stamps generated are that of the virtual machine, and not that of the client.

I've tried using Moment JS and Moment Timezone JS to generate time stamps -- I've tried using moment.tz.guess() client-side -- all which work fine when locally deployed, but I'm still getting the UTC timezone and inaccurate time stamps on my AWS instance. My desired behavior is to get the timestamp of the browser sending the request.

I've looked all over StackOverflow, and I'm sorry if I'm missing something or am not fully understanding things. All of the methods I could find give me my local system time, but once deployed, my timestamps are off, reflecting that of the AWS instance.

How can I get the client's time to appear as the timestamp, rather than the time of the server? Should I change my AWS instance timezone settings? Even if I did change the timezone on the AWS server, how would I be able to gather the timezone for a user whom connects outside of the timezone in which the virtual machine is living?

Thank you genuinely for any help pointing me in the right direction. I've got myself confused and my strategy is likely incorrect :(

Answer 1

I was able to resolve my issue to get my chat app to display client time, not server time, without changing server time in any way.

Here's what I did:

Imported Moment.JS library into my client side:

<script src="/moment/moment.js"></script>
<script src="/moment-timezone/builds/moment-timezone-with-data.js"></script>

Converted server message timestamp to client timezone:

message.timestamp = moment(message.timestamp).tz(moment.tz.guess()).format('h:mm:ss A');

The timestamp recorded by the server ( message.timestamp ) is converted to whatever timezone that moment.js can gather ( moment.tz.guess() ). And then is converted to my desired format.

I did try to spoof it with a VPN but it appears not to use geo-locating but literally gathers it from the user's system time. So even connected via a VPN from the other side of the country, I was still getting local system time. I was able to confirm conversion is working, as a family member in another timezone was able to try my app and saw that the time did successfully convert. Previously on my deployed machine the timestamp would not match my local machine. But now, it converts to my timezone and to others' -- Cool!