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
Related
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
I'm trying to get a time of users action.
However, it seems return default UTC time even I changed timezone as seoul(UTC +9).
Here are what I did.
in
config/application.rb
put codes as follow.(change default time_zone to seoul)
config.time_zone = 'Seoul'
config.active_record.default_timezone = :local
then, run
rails c
Time.now
I expect time as UTC +9, but it shows UTC +0
Saved time of users action in data is also shown UTC +0.
How can I get time as UTC +9?, is there anything that I need to set?
Try
config.time_zone = 'Korea Time Zone (UTC+09:00)'
When I pop open the rails application.config to set the timezone, I come across an example like this:
config.time_zone = 'Central Time (US & Canada)'
But I would like to try to set my time to something like GMT+6 unfortunately if I try to use that value I get a Invalid Time Zone error. So what name do I have to use to get GMT+6? I tried looking up the name on TimeandDate.com but that gave me the same error when I tried to put Kyrgyzstan Time
Where exactly is the list of time zones rails uses? Or do I have to use some other format like +0600 (which doesn't work by the way)
Thanks,
If you run
rake time:zones:all OFFSET=+6
you will get a list of cities
* UTC +06:00 *
Almaty
Astana
Dhaka
Ekaterinburg
of which the names can be directly used, like
config.time_zone = 'Astana'
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
In almost every environment.rb, there's a line for config.time_zone = 'UTC'.
What exactly does this line do, and under what circumstances would I want to change it (to, e.g., config.time_zone = 'EST')?
Setting config.time_zone changes the default time zone for your Rails application. This is the time zone all times will be displayed in to your users. It is also the time zone it assumes when setting attributes.
However, Rails will always store the times in UTC in the database. The translation happens behind the scenes so (most of the time) you don't have to worry about it.
It's common to change this time zone to one that most of your users will be in. You can run this rake task to see all time zones you can choose from.
rake time:zones:all
It is also very easy to change the current time zone on a per-request basis allowing each user to configure which time zone they are in. here's a before filter example you might add to the application controller.
before_filter :set_user_time_zone
private
def set_user_time_zone
Time.zone = current_user.time_zone if logged_in?
end
See this Railscasts episode for more information.
Just to add one point to Ryan's excellent answer. If you wanted to set it to Eastern Time, it wouldn't be
config.time_zone = 'EST'
it would be
config.time_zone = 'Eastern Time (US & Canada)'
Use one of the following time zones to get the list of available options:
rake time:zones:all
rake time:zones:local
rake time:zones:us