title: How do I make Rails use the system time by default?
body: <p>I want to configure my Rails 4.2.5 app to use the time zone of the system it's running on (e.g. Time.current same as Time.now), without having to hard-code it into the config.</p>
  
  <p><strong>This is for compatibility with an existing legacy infrastructure that was created before I was hired.  I'm fully aware of the best practice of using UTC by default, and one day we'll rewrite all of our code to use UTC as the default, but that is not an option today.  Since the existing code and apps use the server's non-UTC timezone as the default, breaking that convention would break our existing code.</strong></p>
  
  <p><strong>This is a proprietary app which runs on cloud instances that are automatically deployed using chef; individual instances are <em>not</em> manually administered.  Therefore the OS config <em>is</em> the application environment config and is consistent across all instances.  Also, everything runs on Linux only, so portability is not a concern.</strong> </p>
  
  <p>The docs say that Time.current will return Time.now if Time.zone or config.time_zone are set.  I have config.time_zone unset in application.rb, but it is still somehow set to "UTC" by default.  How can I prevent this, so that Rails just uses the OS's time zone setting instead?</p>