Why does Time.now.today? return false in my Rails 4 application?

Question

It is 8:04PM in the Eastern Standard Time Zone (US) on February 5, 2016.

When I run this command

Time.now.today?
#=> false

it returns false.

Why, and how can I correct it? Thanks.

Details:

• Rails 4.0.0
• Ruby 2.2.1p85
• Mac OS X El Capitan

Answer 1

One thing that often confuses people is that Time.now and Time.current are rather different objects.

Time.now returns Ruby library's Time class as it is. It returns the system time.

Time.current returns Time that's modified by Rails ActiveSupport library. It returns system time modified by Rails time_zone setting.

today? method is declared in ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone, and it determines if the given object's time is today based on Time.current, not Time.now.

So if your Time.now and Time.current have different dates, calling Time.now.today? will return false.

If both represent the same day, Time.now.today? will return true.

Time.current.today? should always return true.

Except for some special cases, it'd be better to avoid Time.now and use Time.current all the time in Rails.

Answer 2

I think your issue may be a time zone setting. When you ran this at 8:04PM EST, that is 1:04AM UTC, your timezone appears to be set to UTC hence 1:04AM UTC is tomorrow (Feb 6, 2016).

I would check your config/application.rb and try changing your timezone to Eastern Time (US & Canada), It looks from your comment above it's currently set to UTC (default).

Running commands with (Eastern Time (US & Canada):

Time.now
=> 2016-02-05 22:42:08 -0500
Time.now.today?
=> true
Date.today
=> Fri, 05 Feb 2016
Time.zone
=> #<ActiveSupport::TimeZone:0x007f9a1bcffd20 @name="Eastern Time (US & Canada)", @utc_offset=nil, @tzinfo=#<TZInfo::TimezoneProxy: America/New_York>, @current_period=#<TZInfo::TimezonePeriod: #<TZInfo::TimezoneTransitionDefinition: #<TZInfo::TimeOrDateTime: 1446357600>,#<TZInfo::TimezoneOffset: -18000,0,EST>>,#<TZInfo::TimezoneTransitionDefinition: #<TZInfo::TimeOrDateTime: 1457852400>,#<TZInfo::TimezoneOffset: -18000,3600,EDT>>>>

When I run the same commands (UTC timezone):

Notice that Time.now.in_time_zone is actually tomorrow, thus Time.now.today? => false

Time.now
=> 2016-02-05 22:27:15 -0500
Time.now.today?
=> false
Time.now.in_time_zone
=> Sat, 06 Feb 2016 03:27:29 UTC +00:00
Date.today
=> Fri, 05 Feb 2016
Date.current.in_time_zone
=> Sat, 06 Feb 2016 00:00:00 UTC +00:00
Time.zone
=> #<ActiveSupport::TimeZone:0x007fa19313f7e0 @name="UTC", @utc_offset=nil, @tzinfo=#<TZInfo::TimezoneProxy: Etc/UTC>, @current_period=#<TZInfo::TimezonePeriod: nil,nil,#<TZInfo::TimezoneOffset: 0,0,UTC>>>>