How does Rails know my timezone? - ruby-on-rails

How does Rails know my time zone? I don't have it set in application.rb:
# config.time_zone = 'Central Time (US & Canada)'
I searched the whole app for time_zone and that is the only instance of it. I don't see any environment variables for time zone set either. I'm on Windows.
C:\Users\Chloe\workspace\MyBestBody>rails runner "p Time.now"
DL is deprecated, please use Fiddle
2015-06-12 23:38:33 -0400
It prints UTC time when deployed to Heroku.
C:\Users\Chloe\workspace\MyBestBody>heroku run rails console
Running `rails console` attached to terminal... up, run.1949
Loading production environment (Rails 4.2.1)
irb(main):001:0> Time.new
=> 2015-06-13 03:28:34 +0000
Rails 4.2.1

From gettimeofday(), or so the ruby MRI source would have me believe:
int __cdecl
gettimeofday(struct timeval *tv, struct timezone *tz)
{
FILETIME ft;
GetSystemTimeAsFileTime(&ft);
filetime_to_timeval(&ft, tv);
return 0;
}
Per comment, this is a C function, called by the ruby date routines under the hood. You do not call the method yourself, rather you call the ruby methods you are calling.

Your question involves two separate things.
The first is what ruby thinks the time zone is. This is the zone used when you use things likeTime.now or Time.mktime. Ruby uses the C level APIs provided by the operating system to get this information (the TZ environment variable can override this on unixy operating systems).
The second is the time zone your users will see when they use your app. This is frequently not the same thing. Even if your users were all in the same timezone it's a good idea to have your servers use UTC because it is free from things like daylight savings time.
For this reason rails has its own timezone system and the setting you found controls the default value of that timezone. Sometimes you might overwrite this on a per user basis. Rails always records information in UTC, but it will be displayed in views using the value of Time.zone (And input from forms is interpreted in that zone). You can see what the current time in this zone is by doing
Time.zone.now

Related

how do I use UTC +14:00 in ruby on rails

I want to use utc+14:00 in my rails app , but
rake time:zones:all
shows up to utc+13:00 only . is there any workaround to use this timezone ?
Rails time zones are a facade around the tzinfo gem, which uses IANA/Olson time zones.
You probably want either the zone "Pacific/Kiritimati", which is in UTC+14 all year, or perhaps "Pacific/Apia", which is in UTC+13 most of the year and in UTC+14 for daylight saving time.
Read the bottom of the timezone tag wiki about Rails time zones, then take a look at the mapping constant. You'll see that "Pacific/Apia" is mapped to the Rails name of "Samoa", but "Pacific/Kiritimati" is not in the map.
The best advice I can offer is to use the TzInfo gem directly, and not use Rails time zone "friendly" names.

Setting system time in rspec tests without changing system clock

I'm working on getting a rails 3 application ready to use time zones. My development machine is in EDT and the servers I'm hosting on are in UTC. Is there a way in my rspec tests to change the system time zone ruby is using so that I'm running tests using the same system time zone without having to change the system clock on my computer? I've looked into Delorean and Timecop and they're not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for something like
Time.system_time_zone = "UTC"
...and then Time.now would return the UTC time instead of whatever my system time zone is set to.
before {Time.stub(:now) {Time.now.utc}}
With this, anywhere Time.now is called in your tests, it will return your system's time in UTC.
Example:
describe Time do
before {Time.stub(:now) {Time.now.utc}}
it "returns utc as my system's time" do
Time.now.utc?.should be_true
end
end
Rails gives you precisely what you are looking for:
Time.zone = "UTC"
Look at http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/Time.html#method-c-zone-3D for more information.

Rails Postgres Time Zone Handling

The simple thing I want is to store a DateTime in UTC in the database and retrieve it in UTC again, but rails seems to assume I stored the DateTime in my local time zone and adds the 8 hours difference (PST). I have a DateTime field in my model. If I send a request (PUT) to update this field in a particular instance of my model, somehow timezones get mixed up for whatever reason:
Sending to rails via PUT: 2012-02-17T03:46:58Z
Returned via subsequent GET: 2012-02-17T11:46:58Z
The time difference is exactly 8 hours and could be explained by my timezone which is PST (-08:00).
I am using Datamapper 1.2 on Rails 3.1.3.
I set my application config timezone to UTC explicitly.
I also tried to use dm-zone-types. Did not change anything for me.
A git-bisect on my repo revealed, that this misbehavior was introduced as I switched the database to postgres from the original sqlite. This commit only changed the database.yml and the gemfile. Nothing else.
Any ideas?
I have found a hacky solution myself:
Set the servers timezone in the environment variable TZ to 'UTC'. In order to persist this configuration option, I decided to put the environment variable setting in config/boot.rb:
ENV['TZ'] = "UTC"
I still feel dirty and this solution still gives me the willies. So any better/cleaner solution is highly appreciated!

Ruby on Rails, delayed_job serializing incorrect datetime as GMT

I have some code that seems to execute improperly when it is serialized and run with delayed_job. To get the necessaries out of the way, I am running Ubuntu 11.04, Ruby 1.8.7 with Rails 3.0.4.
I have a datetime field in one of my tables that obviously stores the date and time of a particular event. In my RoR application, I use this field through the application calling strftime on it to format it in different ways. The output of this formatting is correct on the web page.
I am also using delayed_job to put this same field into an email that is sent out (triggered via some action). When the email arrives, it appears that it has somehow been formatted as GMT. For example, if the date time was supposed to be 11-12-2011 15:30:00 (3:30 PM) in the database, the email would read 11-12-2011 22:30:00 (10:30 PM).
I looked in the database and found somethings that are interesting:
The datetime in the database is 2011-11-12 22:30:00
The app, when displayed via the web, formats the data properly as 11-12-2011, 3:30 PM
The email, formats the data properly as 11-12-2011, 10:30 PM
When I run a small ruby file that simply prints the date and time
p Time.now
I get this the correct output (local, non GMT time)
Mon Aug 15 10:15:27 -0600 2011
When I look at what is in the serialized yaml for the delayed_jobs table, I can see that the date field is formatted as
2011-11-12 22:30:00 Z
In my application.rb, I have
config.time_zone = 'Mountain Time (US & Canada)'
and in my environment.rb, I have
timezone = "Mountain Time (US & Canada)"
Can any one help me figure out what is going on here? I am relatively new to RoR, so this may be a super obvious, easy question. If you need any more debug information, please let me know and I can post it up. Similarly, if my question is unclear, I can try to clar
In my case, I solved explicitly specifying the method in_time_zone in the view
example: #my_obj.created_at.in_time_zone.
I know it is not elegant, but so far I have not found better solutions.
Try changing the date object to a string before serializing.
You may want to set the timezone in the database. If it's MySQL, see: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/time-zone-support.html

Getting local time

I've got this time stored as a string:
2010-07-25 04:16:25
This is the GMT time for some action I took.
Since I live in the Jerusalem time zone, I would like to show it at Jerusalem time, i.e. 07:16 in the morning, not the GMT time of 04:16:25 which is 3 hours before.
How do I properly convert it programmatically with Ruby on Rails? I seem to get lost with the multitude of timezone functions and considerations I need to take when serving users from different locations.
I tried:
Time.parse("2010-07-25 04:16:25")
and it gave me:
"Sun Jul 25 04:16:25 +0300 2010".
I suppose the "+0300" is the difference to where I'm at?
Some light on this, or even a link to a good article that doesn't assume you know much, would help.
You can define your timezone in environment.rb file (if you are using Rails 2.3.*) or application.rb (if you're using Rails 3).
Just look for section about time zones and everything is explained in comment. It will say something like this (this is from Rails 3):
# 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 = 'Central Time (US & Canada)'
Just uncomment that last line and you should be fine.
To configure it easily related to your system local zone you can add this in your application.rb
config.time_zone = Time.now.zone
and you can use something like this to get the localtime
Post.created_at.localtime

Resources