Generic "config/database.yml" for Postgres

I'm really lazy and always use the exact same "config/database.yml" file with my Rails projects....

Another Quick Rails/Postgres Tip

Assuming your local timezone is not 'UTC' you most likely will want to configure Postgres to use it anyway on your development machine so that your development environment behaves like your production environment.  To do this just find the 'timezone=' line in postgresql.conf and set it to 'UTC'.

Time Zones in Rails using Postgres

It appears that by default Rails creates it's timestamps in Postgres using timestamps without time zone information.  This means that if you're working directly with the database, using psql for example, and want to see local time representations you'll have to do something like this.

Specifically notice that I'm using the TIMEZONE function to re-cast the column to a timestamp with timezone.  Since the columns implied timezone is 'UTC' that's what's used.  Now that we have a timestamp with timezone we can convert that to local time using the "AT TIME ZONE" syntax.