mockra

Dealing with timezones is one of the more painful parts of the development process on most stacks. Luckily due to a variety of available tools and strong conventions provided by Ruby on Rails, timezones are much easier to wrangle.

One of my favorite tools for providing dates in a user’s given timezone is the local_time gem. You can find the documentation, here.

To install the gem you’ll first need to add it to your Gemfile.

gem 'local_time'

You can then run bundle install. Once that’s done, you’ll need to include the provided javascript file in your app/assets/javascripts/application.js. You can do so by adding the following line:

//= require local_time

You’ll then use the helper methods provided to display your dates. Here’s an example:

  <%= local_time_ago(comment.created_at) %>
  # Output: 14 hours ago