How do I work with Time in Rails?

Question

I've been pulling my hair out trying to work with Time in Rails. Basically I need to set all time output (core as well as ActiveSupport) to the server's local time -- no GMT, no UTC, etc. I've seen various posts relating to Time, but they usually involve someone's need to set it for each user. Mine isn't nearly as complex, I simply want consistency when I use any Time object. (I'd also appreciate not receiving errors every 3 seconds telling me that I can't convert a Fixnum (or some other type) to string -- it's Ruby, just do it!)

I also seem to be getting drastically different times for Time.new vs the ActiveSupport 1.second.ago. Anyway, does anyone have any quality suggestions as regards working with Time in Rails?

Answer 1

If you just want Time objects to be consistent, then why not stick with UTC? I just tried Time.new and 1.second.ago using script/console and I get the same output (give or take a second for typing the command). How are you doing it?

Answer 2

Somewhere in your initializers, define the format(s) that you want to use.

ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::Time::Conversions::DATE_FORMATS.merge!(:default => '%m/%d/%Y %H:%M')
ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::Time::Conversions::DATE_FORMATS.merge!(:my_special_format => '%H:%M %p')

Then when you want to print a Time object, it works like the following example. Notice that the Time object in my console is already aware of my time zone. I'm not performing any magical transformations here.

>> t = Time.now
=> Wed Jul 15 18:47:33 -0500 2009
>> t.to_s
=> "07/15/2009 18:47"
>> t.to_s(:my_special_format)
=> "18:47 PM"

Calling Time#to_s uses the :default format, or you can pass in the name of the format you'd rather use like I did with :my_special_format.

You can see the various options for formatting a Time object here.

Answer 3

If u don't want to store each user time setting, the only solution is to use javascript time system because it work on user client time. For example i have an application that each time user try it, the app will create some example data with each data have a initial date value "today". At first time, it confuse me a lot because my host server is in australia and lot of user is on western part, so sometime the initial date value is not "today", it said "yesterday" because of different time region.

After a couple day of headache i finally take decision to JUST use javascript time system and include it in the link, so when user click the "try now" link it will also include today date value.

<% javascript_tag do -%>
  var today = new Date();
  $("trynow").href = "<%= new_invitation_path %>?today=" + today.toLocaleString();
<% end -%>

Answer 4

Add the following to config/environment.rb to handle time correctly and consistently all the time within the context of Rails. It's important to know that it will store your times to the database in UTC -- but this is what you want -- all the conversion is done automatically.

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

You can run rake time:zones:local from your Rails root directory to get a list of valid time zone strings in your area.

Answer 5

A quick addition to the DATE_FORMAT solution posted above. Your format can be a string, in which case it works as noted above by calling strftime, but you can also define the format as a lambda:

CoreExtensions::Time::Conversions::DATE_FORMATS.merge! :my_complex_format => lambda {|time|
   # your code goes here
}