System time zone on local ruby
Most production servers will have a system time zone of UTC. For example on heroku:
$ heroku run rails c
Running rails c on ⬢ brownwebdesign... up, run.2977
Loading production environment (Rails 4.1.16)
irb(main):001:0> Time.now
=> 2017-07-11 12:45:33 +0000
Most local development environments will have a time zone of the system time zone. If your Mac's time is Eastern, your time will look like this:
$ rails c
Loading development environment (Rails 4.1.16)
[1] pry(main)> Time.now
=> 2017-07-11 08:46:52 -0400
This typically will not cause any issues because rails will convert time to UTC to store in database and then convert time to the set time zone configured in the app. Woring with time zones in your rails app is a whole other topic (checkout this article for some great tips).
However, I recently ran into an issue where I was using the Chronic
gem to parse user inputed time and it uses the system ruby time. My
devlopment results were not matching production results. I found a neat
tip to easily make your local system ruby use UTC just like the
production system: just set the TZ environment variable:
$ TZ=UTC rails s
## or ##
$ TZ=utc rails c
Loading development environment (Rails 4.1.16)
[1] pry(main)> Time.now
=> 2017-07-11 12:55:45 +0000