How do you do relative time in Rails?

Question

I\'m writing a Rails application, but can\'t seem to find how to do relative time, i.e. if given a certain Time class, it can calculate \"30 seconds ago\" or \"2 days ago\"

Answer 1

If you're building a Rails application, you should use

Time.zone.now
Time.zone.today
Time.zone.yesterday

This gives you time or date in the timezone with which you've configured your Rails application.

For example, if you configure your application to use UTC, then Time.zone.now will always be in UTC time (it won't be impacted by the change of British Summertime for example).

Calculating relative time is easy, eg

Time.zone.now - 10.minute
Time.zone.today.days_ago(5)