My Rails 5 app is set to BRT (Brazilian timezone) and my Postgres database to UTC. I never had to worry about that because Rails always calculated the correct time when reading from or writing to the database. So for example when I had an input field with time = 15:00 it would write 18:00 to the database and when reading from the database it would return 15:00 again. Perfect!

But now I want to write the beginning of the month to the database:

Time.now.beginning_of_month which is 2017-04-01 00:00:00

Payment.create(
  :time => Time.now.beginning_of_month
)

Now it writes exactly this (in BRT) to the database without converting to UTC. When I read this from the database later it converts it to BRT 2017-03-31 21:00:00 which is wrong.

Of course I could convert the time to UTC before saving it to the database. But I find it strange that Rails always took care of converting and in this case it does not.

I hope the problem became clear.

Any ideas?