Ruby on Rails Time Without Time Zone

Nauman Tariq
2 min readJul 23, 2022

In Ruby and Rails, there is no class dedicated to time-of-day, so 2000–01–01 is used for the time. ActiveModel implements a Time class to reflect the database type of time. And it will convert the time according to your app’s timezone Rails.application.config.time_zone

Suddenly, our time has increased by 10/11 hours after upgrading our Rails 4 application to Rails 5, since it took 08:31:00 and converted it to Sydney time Sat, 01 Jan 2000 19:31:00 AEDT +11:00. In daylight saving, its 11+, otherwise its 10+ hours.

In our use case we only saving just purely time, it doesn't have to relate any daylight savings or time zone, we only needed model.time_value.strftime(“ %R”) to tell it just time without converting it with added timezone.

We save time in postgres with time_field and field DDL is time_value time , also we use user profile base timezones to parse data and time

Let’s take an example values shown directly from database:

time_value
------------
08:31:00
(1 row)

And when you see rails c output

model.time_value
=> Sat, 01 Jan 2000 19:31:00 AEDT +11:00
model.time_value.strftime('%R')
=> "19:31"

Take another, database value

time_value

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Nauman Tariq
Nauman Tariq

Written by Nauman Tariq

Software geek passionate about UX/UI. Founder of Platepose.com & Inventlist.com, RubyonRails.link creator, GreenRuby.org contributor.

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