I just recently worked on a project in which I needed to modify what time the Ruby on Rails server thought it was. I was able to change this very easily with the help of court3nay while on #rubyonrails.
def Time.now
Time.parse("2010-02-30", nil)
end
With this I am able to change the server time whenever I want! The system was one in which user interface capabilities changed at different times of the month. Obviously I didn’t want to wait 20 days to see something different!
I placed this code snippet in my config/environments/development.rb file so that everything in my application could access it, and it wouldn’t affect the test or production environments. The only downside to this is that you have to restart the server in order to change the time. Of course, in RoR this takes like 5 seconds so it was no big deal for me.
In my specs I used stuff like
date = "2008-01-01" Time.stub!(:now).and_return(Time.parse(date))
which of course made it very easy to write effective specs that covered all of my functionality. Thank you RSpec!
Voila, now you too can control time!!