Why does Heroku log using the server time rather than the Rails time zone?

Question

UPDATE: Ok, I didn\'t formulate a good Q to be answered. I still struggle with heroku being on -07:00 UTC and I at +02:00 UTC.

Q: How do I get the log writte

Answer 1

I found that the above solutions did not work on Heroku. I put this in my config/environments/production.rb Make sure you put it before your logger is initialized

Rails::Rack::Logger.class_eval do
# Override logging to spit out time in different zone to easier find user reported 
errors
# https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/v3.2.14/railties/lib/rails/rack/logger.rb#L38
 def started_request_message(request)
  'Started %s "%s" for %s at %s' % [
    request.request_method,
    request.filtered_path,
    request.ip,
    Time.now.in_time_zone('Melbourne') ]
 end
end

Answer 2

Without being able to change the actual server time (which I don't think you'll be able to do on Heroku), your only option is to convert the times yourself.

If Time.zone.now is too cumbersome, you could set a global timezone using the tzinfo gem:

$tz = TZInfo::Timezone.get("Europe/Oslo")
$tz.now # current time in Norway

But this is still a global change in your app and not significantly different from what you're doing.

Answer 3

After some further investigation into my own Heroku timezone problems, I found a post which indicates that you actually can specify the timezone at an application level, using the following command:

heroku config:add TZ=Europe/Oslo

I believe this may be the answer to all your troubles. Courtesy of http://www.reality.hk/articles/2010/01/07/1319/ (Edit: Broken link as of 2012.08.23. Archived copy.)