I was using Active Record in a batch application to manipulate some data, and I needed the timezone handling built into the newer versions. But I had a hell of a time trying to figure out how to make it all work.

In plain Rails, it’s simple:

Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
  config.time_zone = 'Pacific Time (US & Canada)'
end

But I wasn’t running Rails proper, and didn’t want to pull in the whole Rails boot sequence. So the Rails::Initializer call didn’t work. To do it manually, time zone config turns out it’s a 3 lines of setup calls:

require 'activerecord'
Time.zone = "Pacific Time (US & Canada)"
ActiveRecord::Base.time_zone_aware_attributes = true
ActiveRecord::Base.default_timezone = "Pacific Time (US & Canada)"

When you do that, time zone attributes work both going into the database, and coming back out. If you miss the last line, they’ll just not work coming out, which is a damn confusing thing to deal with.

Ohh, and one other thing I ran into when getting this setup is that AR pulls in Active Support, which in turn pulls in Builder (to hack xml support or something). Just watch out for that, you’ll get weird crashes if you don’t have builder installed. Honestly, I just went and commented out the areas of Active Support that did it, I didn’t want builder anyway.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 8:23 am and is filed under Programming, Rails, Ruby, Sinatra. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.