Converting UTC Dates / Times to local timezone in Rails

I’m currently bug-fixing on a Rails project, and encountered the need to convert the default UTC date-formats into local times, seeing as we’re enjoying our extra hour in our glorious British summer time. The documentation is a little confusing on this point, but I found that a good solution is to keep UTC for use in the database, and to just convert the string representation in the front-end:

<%= some_model.created_at.in_time_zone('London').to_s(:short) %>

This would be good enough to work with sorting, and finds too, provided you were a little careful about which date representation you were using. There is also the ability to change the timezone with Time.zone = “London”.

Tags: GMT, Ruby On Rails, Time, UTC

This entry was posted on April 21, 2010 at April 21, 2010 and is filed under Ruby On Rails. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.