If you need to set up custom date formats in Rails, for example to show in Views, you can do so by creating a config/initializers/time_formats.rb file and adding as many of the following as you want:

Time::DATE_FORMATS[:au_datetime] = '%e/%m/%Y %I:%M%P'
Time::DATE_FORMATS[:au_date] = '%e/%m/%Y'

You can even use lambdas when defining a format, which will be executed using .call when you call to_s on your Time:

Time::DATE_FORMATS[:short_ordinal]  = ->(time) { time.strftime("%B #{time.day.ordinalize}") }

This is covered in more detail in the Rails Time documentation here:

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/Time.html#method-i-to_formatted_s