Formatting timestamps

Question

How do you format Rails timestamps in a more human-readable format? If I simply print out created_at or updated_at in my view like this:

Answer 1

you have to modify the timestamp file, in my case this file is located in /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p195/gems/activerecord-4.2.0/lib/active_record/timestamp.rb. You must search for this line:

self.class.default_timezone == :utc ? Time.now.utc : Time.now

and change it to this:

self.class.default_timezone == :utc ? Time.now.utc : Time.now.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H-%M-%S')

The trick is to modify the format with the strftime method, you can change the format if you want.

Now rails will use your format to update the "updated_at" column.