[SOLVED] How to create a new DateTime object in a specific time zone (preferably the default time zone of my app, not UTC)?

How to create a new DateTime object in a specific time zone (preferably the default time zone of my app, not UTC)?

I have set the time zone in /config/application.rb, and I expect all times generated in my app to be in this time zone by default, yet when I create a new DateTime object (using .new), it creates it in GMT. How can I get it to be in my app's time zone?

config/application.rb

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

irb

DateTime.now
# => Wed, 11 Jul 2012 19:04:56 -0700 

mydate = DateTime.new(2012, 07, 11, 20, 10, 0)
# => Wed, 11 Jul 2012 20:10:00 +0000                    # GMT, but I want PDT

Using in_time_zone doesn't work because that just converts the GMT time to PDT time, which is the wrong time:

mydate.in_time_zone('Pacific Time (US & Canada)')
# => Wed, 11 Jul 2012 13:10:00 PDT -07:00               # wrong time (I want 20:10)

Solution

You can use ActiveSupport's TimeWithZone (Time.zone) object to create and parse dates in the time zone of your application:

1.9.3p0 :001 > Time.zone.now
 => Wed, 11 Jul 2012 19:47:03 PDT -07:00 
1.9.3p0 :002 > Time.zone.parse('2012-07-11 21:00')
 => Wed, 11 Jul 2012 21:00:00 PDT -07:00