displayed date/times are incorrect

[Daryes]

Hello,
I would like to have the iso-8601 date format with the complete time zone designation, supported by rundeck, either through a setting or an additional parameter on the command line.

Currently, rundeck-cli return the date in this format : 2017-05-2511:21:00+0200

Using the exact same date and time, iso-8601 date format is very close : 2017-05-25T13:21:00+0200
With a subtle difference : the time is in the local time, when rundeck-cli return the UTC time

Most utilities and languages, starting with the "date" command can immediately understand the iso-8601 date without error, but aren't able to do so with the rundeck-cli default format

[gschueler]

You can set RD_DATE_FORMAT, although I see it is not documented. It uses the Java SimpleDateFormat syntax.

The default is yyyy-MM-ddHH:mm:ssZ but seems like that is not exactly iso-8601

[Daryes]

Useful option. I played with it for a while, and got the wanted format, but it seems there's still a problem, caused by the date package itself : the time is always returned relative to the UTC timezone.

I've search about it, and multiple time it's suggested to not use the default date package, but instead use either the new java.time package in java 8 or Joda-Time.

I've already built a function to deal with this behavior, so no hurry about it, but this switch might be worth considering

[gschueler]

when you say "relative to the UTC timezone" what do you mean? do you have some examples? are you expecting it relative to local system timezone?

also, try using RD_DEBUG=3 to see the API response data. I believe the data is sent in UTC timezone, perhaps we just need a way to convert to another timezone

[Daryes]

Meaning this : local time is 22h10, GMT+1 (with daylight saving time)
Aside the format using UTC as reference, others formats should return either 22:10+0200 or something similar, but using the local time.
Currently, rd-cli return 20:10+0200. I tried with different formats, and the time is always set to the UTC tz, and not relative to the current tz (i.e. : should be 22:.10... ).

btw, I forgot to link a reference : https://stackoverflow.com/a/21940449
But everything I found says the same.

This aside, I ran the test, and the data sent from rundeck to rd-cli is indeed in UTC tz (the following job is scheduled at 06:15 am) :

"executions": [
        {
            "argstring": "-HISTORY_KEEP 5 -HISTORY_STATE succeeded",
            "date-ended": {
                "date": "2017-08-24T04:15:35Z",
                "unixtime": 1503548135537
            },
            "date-started": {
                "date": "2017-08-24T04:15:00Z",
                "unixtime": 1503548100348
            },
            "description": "/server/rundeck/tools/rundeck_history_clear.sh -clear jobs -state ${option.HISTORY_STATE} -keep_count ${option.HISTORY_KEEP} ('nettoyage')",
            "executionType": "scheduled",
            "href": "http://hephaistos.reseau.local:4440/api/20/execution/186",
            "id": 186,
            "job": {
(...)
        },

Casting the date with a forced TZ might correct this, but not sure there wont be a side effect with other TZ

[gschueler]

i think there is a bug converting the date string (in UTC) into the correct date before rd displays it. that is also a separate issue from correctly rendering the parsed date into local time zone

[gschueler]

try the newest release

[Daryes]

Sorry, missed the comment as I didn't check back the issue : though it was closed, and usually, furthers comments are ignored ... most of the time.

When I saw the new version between your 2 posts, I updated rd-cli.
I had to remove all custom date manipulation, because as it's the good news, the new version works as expected. No issue with it, the dependency script I've made could process immediately the date as is.
Thank you.