CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-rails
Elliot
Elliot

Reputation: 13835

Time.now & Created_at are different? Ruby on Rails

My site is deployed on heroku. Time.now will return today, but the created_at field of a record (created right now) will say its tomorrow. I assume this has to do with server time?

Is there a way to make sure they're the same? Best, Elliot

Update so I did this "heroku rake time:zones:us"

it gave me:

    * UTC -10:00 *
Hawaii

* UTC -09:00 *
Alaska

* UTC -08:00 *
Pacific Time (US & Canada)

* UTC -07:00 *
Arizona
Mountain Time (US & Canada)

* UTC -06:00 *
Central Time (US & Canada)

* UTC -05:00 *
Eastern Time (US & Canada)
Indiana (East)

however, when I set config.time_zone = 'UTC -05:00' in my environment, the app fails to start. any ideas?

Upvotes: 11

Views: 11658

Answers (4)

Roger Perez
Roger Perez

Reputation: 3129

I added the following to lines of code. I wanted the created_at to be on the ActiveRecord data creation. 

config/Application.rb

module RailsApp
  class Application < Rails::Application

    config.time_zone = 'Pacific Time (US & Canada)'
    config.active_record.default_timezone = 'Pacific Time (US & Canada)'


  end
end

Upvotes: 0

Fulvio
Fulvio

Reputation: 965

Just need to uncomment and change to the time zone you wanna.

If you want to check all the time zone, run rake time:zones:all and will output a list.

config/Application.rb

module Clerk
  class Application < Rails::Application
    # Settings in config/environments/* take precedence over those specified here.
    # Application configuration should go into files in config/initializers
    # -- all .rb files in that directory are automatically loaded.

    # Set Time.zone default to the specified zone and make Active Record auto-convert to this zone.
    # Run "rake -D time" for a list of tasks for finding time zone names. Default is UTC.
    config.time_zone = 'La Paz'

    # The default locale is :en and all translations from config/locales/*.rb,yml are auto loaded.
    # config.i18n.load_path += Dir[Rails.root.join('my', 'locales', '*.{rb,yml}').to_s]
    # config.i18n.default_locale = :de
  end
end

Upvotes: 0

Topher Hunt
Topher Hunt

Reputation: 4804

To add onto Roadmaster's answer, I had a similar challenge: the normal Rails timestamps were stored based on UTC in the database, but I needed to query to find all records created today according to the local time zone.

The query looked like this:

completions.where("created_at BETWEEN ? AND ?", 
  Date.today, Date.today + 1.day).count >= 1

I fixed this by calling #to_time on the dates, as follows. This converted them into a timestamp having the proper time zone, and the correct records were fetched in the database, effectively making the query timezone-aware.

completions.where("created_at BETWEEN ? AND ?", 
  Date.today.to_time, Date.today.to_time + 1.day).count >= 1

Upvotes: 1

Roadmaster
Roadmaster

Reputation: 5357

Rails always stores UTC time on the database; the created_at field by itself should be offset by exactly your timezone's variation relative to UTC.

Whenever you load a record in your application, the fields get converted to the timezone specified in environment.rb. It might have something like this:

config.time_zone = 'UTC'

For the time to be converted properly to your timezone, you might change this configuration setting to one matching your actual time zone. For instance:

config.time_zone = 'Central Time (US & Canada)'

To see available zones, issue "rake -D time" on your rails directory. This will give you instructions on how to get time zone names for use in configuration.

Upvotes: 17

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