Timezone Problems with Timecop and Circle CI

gistfile1.rb

# System time zone is set to 'Australia/Sydney'
# 
Time.zone = "Europe/Madrid"
=> "Europe/Madrid"
Timecop.freeze(Time.zone.now)
=> 2015-02-06 23:36:46 +1100 # The "frozen" time. +1100 is Australia/Sydney. Oh dear.
Time.zone.now
=> Fri, 06 Feb 2015 13:36:46 CET +01:00 # The time here is for the configured Time.zone; Europe/Madrid +01:00

The problem:
Tests that freeze time with Timecop pass locally, but fail on Circle CI.
When Timecop freezes time, it uses the system timezone, rather than the ActiveSupport::TimeZone configuration (in Rails).

The solution:
Configure Circle CI test machines and Rails to use the same Timezone:

# config/application.rb
config.time_zone = 'Australia/Sydney'

# circle.yml
machine:
  timezone:
    Australia/Sydney

Typo in circle.yml. Should be:

# circle.yml
machine:
  timezone:
    Europe/Moscow

👍 Just ran into the same issue!

👍

A cleaner version:

machine:
  timezone: 'Australia/Sydney'

And if anyone needs it for CircleCI v 2:

  environment:
      TZ: /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Los_Angeles