PHP setlocale and strftime Not Working

If you don’t have shell access to your server, you may need to contact your web host for assistance.

Firstly, check which locales are currently installed on the server.

locale -a
en_US.utf8

Above we can see only en_US.utf8 is installed. If your required locale is missing, you may need to install it using dpkg-reconfigure locales.

sudo pkg-reconfigure locales

Select your required local and and press OK.

Now run locale -a again to see if you locale appears.

Make sure to restart your web server or PHP when adding a new locale.

You can use the following PHP script to test if a local is available to PHP or not.

<?php
$result = setlocale(LC_ALL, 'en_US.utf-8');

if($result === false){
 die('Got error changing locale, check if locale is installed on the system');
}

$dayOfMonth = '%e';
//if it is Windows we will use %#d as %e is not supported
if (strtoupper(substr(PHP_OS, 0, 3)) === 'WIN') {
 $dayOfMonth = '%#d';
}

//Mar 25 Aug 09 - month shortname, day of month, day shortname, year last two digits
echo strftime("%b $dayOfMonth %a %y");
?>

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