Model create overrides custom params :created_at - ruby-on-rails

Question

I am uploading legacy articles to my Rails app. I am sending created_at as a parameter in my request as recommended in this answer. However, this attribute seemingly is not passed "through". I can puts(params[:created_at]) and see my custom created_at, yet in the logs the article is INSERTed with a created_at of the current timestamp.
Here is my articles controller:
class ArticlesController < ApplicationController
before_action :set_article, only: [:show, :update, :destroy]
...
# POST /articles
def create
#section = Section.friendly.find(params[:section_id])
# Can't let people publish by default
#article = #section.articles.build(
article_params.merge(is_published: false)
)
if #article.save
render json: #article, status: :created, location: #article
else
render json: #article.errors, status: :unprocessable_entity
end
end
end
My request is:
http POST :3000/articles title='example' section_id=1 content="<p>the section exists.</p>" slug="example" created_at="2017-06-109T17:57:55.149-05:00"
The logs:
Started POST "/articles" for 127.0.0.1 at 2017-11-24 12:05:06 -0500
Processing by ArticlesController#create as HTML
Parameters: {"title"=>"example", "section_id"=>"1", "content"=>"<p>the section exists.</p>", "slug"=>"example", "created_at"=>"2017-06-109T17:57:55.149-05:00", "article"=>{"title"=>"example", "slug"=>"example", "content"=>"<p>the section exists.</p>", "created_at"=>"2017-06-109T17:57:55.149-05:00", "section_id"=>"1"}}
Section Load (0.3ms) SELECT "sections".* FROM "sections" WHERE "sections"."slug" = $1 ORDER BY "sections"."id" ASC LIMIT $2 [["slug", "1"], ["LIMIT", 1]]
Section Load (0.4ms) SELECT "sections".* FROM "sections" WHERE "sections"."id" = $1 LIMIT $2 [["id", 1], ["LIMIT", 1]]
(0.2ms) BEGIN
SQL (0.6ms) INSERT INTO "articles" ("title", "slug", "content", "is_published", "created_at", "updated_at", "section_id") VALUES ($1, $2, $3, $4, $5, $6, $7) RETURNING "id" [["title", "example"], ["slug", "example"], ["content", "<p>the section exists.</p>"], ["is_published", "f"], ["created_at", "2017-11-24 12:05:06.175751"], ["updated_at", "2017-11-24 12:05:06.175751"], ["section_id", 1]]
(0.8ms) COMMIT
Completed 201 Created in 38ms (Views: 1.1ms | ActiveRecord: 8.0ms)
In my schema.rb:
create_table "articles", force: :cascade do |t|
...
t.datetime "created_at", null: false
My model has no extra methods/callbacks that would ruin the request. It only contains relationships. I don't know if this is relevant, but I saw it in a GitHub issue somewhere: articles and users are in a many2many with an authorships model, and I use devise to authenticate users.
In conclusion, the app is receiving the created_at param just fine, but it is overridden with the default timestamp. If I set record_timestamps to false, the created_at just becomes nil.
Why is my created_at just seemingly ignored?
Rails 5.1, Ruby 2.4.2, Postgres 10.1

Answer 1

Answer given by max: there was a syntatical error in my timestamp. It was not valid, and was ignored by Rails.