Time.now & Created_at are different? Ruby on Rails - ruby-on-rails

Question

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?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

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