Question

I have pretty common issue but for some reason i have tried all the suggestions on the web and none seem to work.

I have set the Timezone in config to ‘EST’

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

But when the time is shown on the the screen, it continues to show the UTC time that is stored in the DB. I tried the debugger and here is the output

(rdb:1) Time.zone 
#<ActiveSupport::TimeZone:0x1061f4760 @utc_offset=nil, @current_period=nil, @name="Eastern Time (US & Canada)", @tzinfo=#<TZInfo::TimezoneProxy: America/New_York>>
(rdb:1) Order.first.placed_at
Fri Jan 01 15:00:00 UTC 2010

Update:
Here is another user who has the same question
Rails timezone is wrong when shown

Answer 1

Try in_time_zone. For example

>> Time.now
=> Sun Dec 05 21:34:45 -0500 2010
>> Time.zone
=> #<ActiveSupport::TimeZone:0x1033d97b8 @name="Pacific Time (US & Canada)", @tzinfo=#<TZInfo::DataTimezone: America/Los_Angeles>, @utc_offset=-28800, @current_period=nil>
>> Time.now.in_time_zone
=> Sun, 05 Dec 2010 18:34:54 PST -08:00

In your case, you want Order.first.placed_at.in_time_zone.