GoogleContainerTools/skaffold · error

bad timezone provided: %q, error: %s

Error message

bad timezone provided: %q, error: %s

What it means

The date/time Tagger formats the current time in a configured IANA time zone. Before formatting it calls time.LoadLocation on the configured TimeZone; if Go cannot resolve that string to a known location (e.g. an invalid name, or no tzdata available on the system), it returns this error instead of a tag.

Source

Thrown at pkg/skaffold/tag/date_time.go:60

		timeFn:   time.Now,
	}
}

// GenerateTag generates a tag using the current timestamp.
func (t *dateTimeTagger) GenerateTag(ctx context.Context, image latest.Artifact) (string, error) {
	format := tagTime
	if len(t.Format) > 0 {
		format = t.Format
	}

	timezone := "Local"
	if len(t.TimeZone) > 0 {
		timezone = t.TimeZone
	}

	loc, err := time.LoadLocation(timezone)
	if err != nil {
		return "", fmt.Errorf("bad timezone provided: %q, error: %s", timezone, err)
	}

	return t.timeFn().In(loc).Format(format), nil
}

View on GitHub (pinned to a1189de023)

Solutions

1. Set timeZone to a valid IANA name (check `timedatectl` or the IANA list), e.g. 'UTC' or 'America/New_York'
2. Install tzdata in the build/run image (apk add tzdata / apt-get install tzdata) so LoadLocation can resolve names
3. Import _ 'time/tzdata' in the binary to embed the zone database when building scratch/distroless images
4. Remove the timeZone field to fall back to the default local time

Example fix

// before
{
  "tagger": { "date_Time": { "format": "2006-01-02", "timeZone": "utc+2" } }
}
// after
{
  "tagger": { "date_Time": { "format": "2006-01-02", "timeZone": "UTC" } }
}

if _, err := time.LoadLocation(cfg.Tagger.DateTime.TimeZone); err != nil {
    return fmt.Errorf("invalid tagger timeZone %q: %w", cfg.Tagger.DateTime.TimeZone, err)
}

func isValidTimeZone(tz string) bool {
    if tz == "" || tz == "Local" { return true }
    _, err := time.LoadLocation(tz)
    return err == nil
}

When it happens

Trigger: skaffold.yaml sets tagger.date_Time.timeZone to a string that time.LoadLocation cannot resolve — a typo like 'utc', a wrong case, a full path with missing zoneinfo database, or a non-IANA alias. Also occurs on minimal/stripped Docker images (alpine, scratch) that lack /usr/share/zoneinfo and where the binary was not built with the embedded tzdata import.

Common situations: Deploying builds inside slim containers without the tzdata package; copying a timeZone value from another tool that expects a POSIX TZ string or a UTC offset like '+02:00' instead of an IANA name like 'Europe/Berlin'; typos after editing skaffold.yaml.

Related errors

• parsing template: %w
• %q is not a valid git tagger variant
• environment variables missing for template keys
• unable to find git commit: %w
• getting git status: %w

AI-assisted analysis of GoogleContainerTools/skaffold@a1189de023 (2026-09-05). Data as JSON: /api/errors/6b087bc16fcc2481. Report an issue: GitHub.