How to use timestamps without timezones in Vapor 4.x?

I have an existing Vapor 3 application in production that has a fair bit of data stored in a PostgreSQL database. I'm currently in the process of upgrading from Vapor 3 to Vapor 4, and I note that the default .datetime type in Vapor 4 migrations is creating columns with a type of timestamp with time zone NOT NULL.

Vapor 3 used timestamp without time zone.

I'd really prefer not to have to migrate all of the CRUD timestamps to a new format if it's not necessary to. Is there a way to specify the format of my .datetime data in the migration/model?

In your Vapor 4 migration, use .custom(SQLRaw("TIMESTAMP WITHOUT TIME ZONE")) instead of .datetime. There is unfortunately no simpler way that I recall.

Thanks, Gwynne. That’s a reasonably contained workaround - do I need to do anything from the model side, or will it respect the format of the column?

To be perfectly honest, I'm not 100% sure. It should "just work", but please let me know if your experience is otherwise!

I've just tried using the custom data type, and Fluent (or PostgreSQL) is decoding the dates incorrectly. I assume it's treating them as if they include the timezone.

I think I'm just going to need to manually migrate the column in my existing schema to use a timezone. That's okay, it appears to be less onerous than I had assumed.

Thanks for the info and the advice, Gwynne!