When a timezone is set in the koha-conf.xml file, the koha-mysql command doesn't work. This seems to be due to missing quotes around the timezone value. For the timezone configuration see: https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Time_Zone_Configuration If you dump the created connection command, you will see something like: mysql --host=<host> --user=XXX --password=XXX --init-command=SET time_zone='America/Sao_Paulo' koha_XXX This will result in an error. Quoting the value for the init-command parameter appears to fix the issue: mysql --host=<host> --user=XXX --password=XXX --init-command="SET time_zone='America/Sao_Paulo'" koha_XXX