Convert UTC to local time in Rails 3

Question

I m having trouble converting a UTC Time or TimeWithZone to local time in Rails 3   Say moment is some Time variable in UTC  e g  moment   Time now utc   How do I convert moment to my time zone  taking care of DST  i e  using EST EDT    More precisely  I d like to printout  Monday March 14  9 AM  if the time correspond to this morning 9 AM EDT and  Monday March 7  9 AM  if the time was 9 AM EST last monday   Hopefully there s another way   Edit  I first thought that  EDT  should be a recognized timezone  but  EDT  is not an actual timezone  more like the state of a timezone  For instance it would not make any sense to ask for Time utc 2011 1 1  in time zone  EDT    It is a bit confusing  as  EST  is an actual timezone  used in a few places that do not use Daylight savings time and are  UTC-5  yearlong

User · Answer

Time localtime will give you the time in the current time zone of the machine running the code    gt  moment   Time now utc     gt  2011-03-14 15 15 58 UTC   gt  moment localtime     gt  2011-03-14 08 15 58 -0700    Update  If you want to conver to specific time zones rather than your own timezone  you re on the right track  However  instead of worrying about EST vs EDT  just pass in the general Eastern Time zone -- it will know based on the day whether it is EDT or EST    gt  Time now utc in time zone  Eastern Time  US  amp  Canada        gt  Mon  14 Mar 2011 11 21 05 EDT -04 00   gt   Time now utc   10 months  in time zone  Eastern Time  US  amp  Canada        gt  Sat  14 Jan 2012 10 21 18 EST -05 00

User · Answer

Rails has its own names  See them with   rake time zones us   You can also run rake time zones all for all time zones  To see more zone-related rake tasks  rake -D time  So  to convert to EST  catering for DST automatically   Time now in time zone  Eastern Time  US  amp  Canada

User · Answer

Don t know why but in my case it doesn t work the way suggested earlier  But it works like this   Time now change offset   -3000     Of course you need to change offset value to yours

User · Answer

There is actually a nice Gem called local time by basecamp to do all of that on client side only  I believe   https   github com basecamp local time

User · Answer

It is easy to configure it using your system local zone  Just in  your application rb add this  config time zone   Time now zone   Then  rails should show you timestamps in your localtime or you can use something like this instruction to get the localtime  Post created at localtime

User · Answer

If you re actually doing it just because you want to get the user s timezone then all you have to do is change your timezone in you config applications rb   Like this   Rails  by default  will save your time record in UTC even if you specify the current timezone   config time zone    Singapore    So this is all you have to do and you re good to go

[ruby-on-rails] Convert UTC to local time in Rails 3

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