Well… I have been ignoring this for a few weeks, because it is not a huge deal, but I thought I might as well fix this.
Problem: The created_at and updated_at dates do not match my system time. Every time I save a record, ActiveRecord records the date 5 hours ahead of my local time. This was messing up some of my cronjobs that run 5 minutes before midnight. Some of the records were not being found, because the date was recorded five hours in the future.
Solution: After some digging on Google, I figured out that this is set in config/environment.rb.
# Run “rake -D time” for a list of tasks for finding time zone names.
config.time_zone = ‘UTC’
I did some more digging and found that UTC is 5 hours ahead of ET, so ActiveRecord was using this timezone instead of my local timezone. The first fix I tried did not work, which was to chagne config.time_zone =”Eastern Time (US & Canada)’ I restarted my app server and still saw created_at was five hours ahead of my server’s system time. So then I just commented it out and restarted the app again. Walah.. it works now. So the correct config to use system timezone is as follows:
# Run “rake -D time” for a list of tasks for finding time zone names.
#config.time_zone = ‘Eastern Time (US & Canada)’
No more worries
