Last week I had shared how to use future dates and Travis-CI to schedule posts for a date in the future. You can read that post by visiting https://jasong.us/2Aqnx9h. One thing I did not cover in that post is that you can schedule posts for a specific time (and timezone).

When writing posts, I can simply add a small adjustment to the date part in my frontmatter. On this specific post, I have set the date to the following:

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date: 2020-05-18 08:00:00 -4

By doing this, I’m setting the time to 8am ET. GitHub Pages and Travis-CI operate from UTC time. Currently, Eastern Time is -4. So, when using Travis-CI, this post will be “skipped” if built anytime before 8am ET on 5/18/2020.

In addition, I like to see the time appropriately on the server in my Travis-CI logs just to be sure it matches with what I’d expect when I look at a build. So, I’ve included the following in my .travis.yml file:

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before_install:
- export TZ=America/New_York
- date

This sets the build server timezone to Eastern Time and then outputs the date in the log and allows me to see the specific time the build kicked off.