n8n – “Invalid DateTime” error on time processing

Over the past week I have been playing with a self-hosted instance of n8n – a Zapier-like automation platform. I quickly ran into an issue, that took a while to debug and I’d like to share my solution here.

I run a pretty standard docker-compose setup.

services:
  n8n:
    image: n8nio/n8n:latest
    ports:
      - "5678:5678"
    environment:
      - GENERIC_TIMEZONE="Europe/Berlin"
      - DB_TYPE=postgresdb
      - DB_POSTGRESDB_HOST=n8n-db
      - DB_POSTGRESDB_PORT=5432
      - DB_POSTGRESDB_DATABASE=n8n
      - DB_POSTGRESDB_USER=n8n
      - DB_POSTGRESDB_PASSWORD=n8n
    volumes:
      - "./n8n-node/:/home/node/"
    depends_on:
      - n8n-db
      - warehouse-db
    restart: unless-stopped

[…]

I live in Timezone Europe/Berlin, so I added the timezone ENV-variable.
The container starts fine and I can create workflows.

Now the weird thing was that date/time processing was broken.

Whenever I would create date/time converting nodes or expressions like {{ $now }} or {{ new Datetime("2024-05-12") }} or {{ DateTime.fromISO("2022-12-24") }} it would always bring up an error message Result: [invalid DateTime]

N8n is using Luxon library for date/time processing and I didn’t get why all provided examples where failing. Several searches and debugging did not bring me closer to a solution. I made sure I was using the latest version of n8n.
When I came across this question, where somebody had a similar problem a year ago. This pointed towards the timezone.

I had my time zone configured as:

…
    - GENERIC_TIMEZONE="Europe/Berlin"
–

Which turns out is just wrong… writing it this way has the quotation marks as part of the string thus the timezone n8n was parsing wasn’t ‘Europe/Berlin’. but ‘”Europe/Berlin”‘.
Removing this faulty line, the date/time processing with Luxon worked like a charme!

…
    - GENERIC_TIMEZONE=Europe/Berlin
–

So getting Invalid DateTime means, luxon fails to parse the timezone and can’t return a valid result. You can try this also with unknown time zones like “Europe/Berlin123” – same error.
So fix your time zone config and the error will vanish!