Rails 3: How to get today's date in specific timezone?

Question

To get today\'s date I do:

Date.today    # => Fri, 20 May 2011

I would like to get today\'s date in a specific timezone, say \'Melbour

Answer 1

If you want to get "today" in some specified time zone without having to change Time.zone, I would do something like fl00r and Dylan Markow suggested:

Time.now.in_time_zone('Melbourne').to_date

or this:

Time.find_zone!('Melbourne').today

I wrote a little helper method Date.today_in_zone that makes getting a "today" Date for a time zone even easier:

 # Defaults to using Time.zone
 > Date.today_in_zone
=> Fri, 26 Oct 2012

 # Or specify a zone to use
 > Date.today_in_zone('Melbourne')
=> Sat, 27 Oct 2012

I think it reads a little nicer than Time.find_zone!('Melbourne').today...

To use it, just throw this in a file like 'lib/date_extensions.rb' and require 'date_extensions'.

class Date
  def self.today_in_zone(zone = ::Time.zone)
    ::Time.find_zone!(zone).today
  end
end