script timezone issue when using Date.now() to populate date fields

Created March 05, 2026 02:49

hello, i'm in detroit, it's 9:30pm on March 4 which means it is currently March 5 in GMT.

I have a Date field that I want to populate with Date.now() in a workflow script. when I do it, it sets 05 Mar 2026 as the date, not 04 Mar!

my youtrack profile (user setting) is Detroit and also my Global Setting is detroit.

to debug a bit, I wrote some timestamps to a text field. here is the code and result.

let n = Date.now();
let j = new Date();
ctx.issue.fields['My Text Field'] = 'now = ' + n + '\ndate = ' + j;
ctx.issue.fields['My Date Field'] = n;

output:

now = 1772678173581
date = Thu Mar 05 2026 02:36:13 GMT+0000 (GMT)

date field = 05 Mar 2026

i thought YouTrack was going to “know” that my user setting is Detroit and adjust to my timezone accordingly?

please let me know if I did something wrong. thanks

3 comments

Sergey Merzlov

Created March 06, 2026 15:52

Official comment

Hi,

I'm Sergey from the YouTrack Team. Thanks for reaching out!

This is expected behavior. The Date.now() function in workflows returns a UTC timestamp, and when you assign it to a Date field, YouTrack resolves the calendar date in UTC. Since Detroit is UTC−5, any time after 7:00 PM local time will already be the next day in UTC, which is why you're seeing March 5 instead of March 4.

Your profile timezone setting does affect how DateTime fields are displayed, but it doesn't change how a raw timestamp maps to a Date field.

The good news is that the date-time module has built-in timezone support that solves this nicely. Here's how you can use it:

const dateTime = require('@jetbrains/youtrack-scripting-api/date-time');

const todayStr = dateTime.format(Date.now(), 'yyyy-MM-dd', 'America/Detroit');
ctx.issue.fields['My Date Field'] = dateTime.parse(todayStr, 'yyyy-MM-dd', 'America/Detroit');

The format() function converts the UTC timestamp to a date string in your timezone, and parse() converts it back to a timestamp that correctly represents that date. By passing 'America/Detroit' explicitly, you ensure it works correctly regardless of which user triggers the workflow.

Let me know if you have any more questions!

Jbonsall

Created March 06, 2026 19:04

hey Sergey, thanks for the quick response!

it makes sense, but now next question is, do you have a way to programmatically check the user's timezone instead of hardcoding the script to use detroit? so i could make a function like this:

function CreateUnixTimestampInMyTimezone() {

const todayStr = dateTime.format(Date.now(), 'yyyy-MM-dd', GET_TIMEZONE_FROM_USER_PROFILE);
return dateTime.parse(todayStr, 'yyyy-MM-dd', GET_TIMEZONE_FROM_USER_PROFILE);

}

then, users of my youtrack instance who are NOT in detroit don't have a problem :)

thanks again

Sergey Merzlov

Created March 11, 2026 16:30

Hi!

In this case, you actually don't need to look up the timezone at all. Both format() and parse() automatically use the current user's profile timezone when you omit the timeZoneId parameter. So your code simplifies to:

const dateTime = require('@jetbrains/youtrack-scripting-api/date-time');

const todayStr = dateTime.format(Date.now(), 'yyyy-MM-dd');
ctx.issue.fields['My Date Field'] = dateTime.parse(todayStr, 'yyyy-MM-dd');

This will respect each user's profile timezone automatically. Just note that for scheduled rules that aren't triggered by a user action, it falls back to the global default timezone setting instead.

Let me know if you have any more questions!

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