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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T01:07:04+00:00

My site is deployed on heroku. Time.now will return today, but the created_at field

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My site is deployed on heroku. Time.now will return today, but the created_at field of a record (created right now) will say its tomorrow. I assume this has to do with server time?

Is there a way to make sure they’re the same?
Best,
Elliot

Update so I did this “heroku rake time:zones:us”

it gave me:

    * UTC -10:00 *
Hawaii

* UTC -09:00 *
Alaska

* UTC -08:00 *
Pacific Time (US & Canada)

* UTC -07:00 *
Arizona
Mountain Time (US & Canada)

* UTC -06:00 *
Central Time (US & Canada)

* UTC -05:00 *
Eastern Time (US & Canada)
Indiana (East)

however, when I set config.time_zone = ‘UTC -05:00’ in my environment, the app fails to start. any ideas?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Rails always stores UTC time on the database; the created_at field by itself should be offset by exactly your timezone’s variation relative to UTC.

    Whenever you load a record in your application, the fields get converted to the timezone specified in environment.rb. It might have something like this:

    config.time_zone = 'UTC'

    For the time to be converted properly to your timezone, you might change this configuration setting to one matching your actual time zone. For instance:

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

    To see available zones, issue “rake -D time” on your rails directory. This will give you instructions on how to get time zone names for use in configuration.

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