How to create a new DateTime object in a specific time zone (preferably the default time zone of my app, not UTC)?

ruby-on-rails datetime ruby-on-rails-3.1 timezone
user664833 picture user664833 · Jul 12, 2012 · Viewed 39k times · Source

I have set the time zone in /config/application.rb, and I expect all times generated in my app to be in this time zone by default, yet when I create a new DateTime object (using .new), it creates it in GMT. How can I get it to be in my app's time zone?

/config/application.rb

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

irb

irb> DateTime.now
=> Wed, 11 Jul 2012 19:04:56 -0700 

irb> mydate = DateTime.new(2012, 07, 11, 20, 10, 0)
=> Wed, 11 Jul 2012 20:10:00 +0000                    # GMT, but I want PDT

Using in_time_zone doesn't work because that just converts the GMT time to PDT time, which is the wrong time:

irb> mydate.in_time_zone('Pacific Time (US & Canada)')
=> Wed, 11 Jul 2012 13:10:00 PDT -07:00               # wrong time (I want 20:10)

Answer

Peter Brown picture Peter Brown · Jul 12, 2012

You can use ActiveSupport's TimeWithZone (Time.zone) object to create and parse dates in the time zone of your application:

1.9.3p0 :001 > Time.zone.now
 => Wed, 11 Jul 2012 19:47:03 PDT -07:00 
1.9.3p0 :002 > Time.zone.parse('2012-07-11 21:00')
 => Wed, 11 Jul 2012 21:00:00 PDT -07:00

Related questions

In Ruby on Rails, what's the difference between DateTime, Timestamp, Time and Date?

In my experience, getting dates/times right when programming is always fraught with danger and difficulity. Ruby and Rails have always eluded me on this one, if only due to the overwhelming number of options; I never have any idea …

Read More
How to add 10 days to current time in Rails

I tried doing something like Time.now + 5.days but that doesn't work, even though I vaguely remember seeing, and being very impressed, with being able to do something like 2.years etc. How do I do that in Rails 3?

Read More
Rails DateTime.now without Time

I need to use DateTime.now to grab the current date, and "strip off" the time. For example, this shows what I don't want: DateTime.now => Sat, 19 Nov 2011 18:54:13 UTC +00:00 This shows what I do want: DateTime.now.some_operation =&…

Read More