How to get the Date and Time in Node

In this post, we'll look at how to get the current date, including the month, year, day, hour, minute, and seconds, in Node.

We'll also look at how to get the date and time formatted in the YYYY-MM-DD and YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss formats. This will all be done in vanilla JavaScript, without any third-party libraries.

Get the Current Date and Time

In Node, you can get the current date and time using the JavaScript Date object. This is native to JavaScript and so comes with Node by default.

To get the current date and time, create a new Date object.

JAVASCRIPT
const now = new Date();

From here, you can call several methods on the Date object.

• getDate(): Returns the day of the month (from 1 - 31)
• getDay(): Returns the day of the week (from 0 - 6)
• getMonth(): Returns the month (from 0 - 11)
• getFullYear(): Returns the year (four digits)
• getHours(): Returns the hour (from 0 - 23)
• getMinutes(): Returns the minutes (from 0 - 59)
• getSeconds(): Returns the seconds (from 0 - 59)

Format the Date and Time

Using the above methods, we can format the date and time in a variety of ways.

Here is how to format a date in the YYYY-MM-DD format.

JAVASCRIPT
const now = new Date();

const year = now.getFullYear();
const month = ("0" + (now.getMonth() + 1)).slice(-2);
const day = ("0" + now.getDate()).slice(-2);

// YYYY-MM-DD
const formatted = `${year}-${month}-${day}`;

Here is the same date and time formatted in the YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss format.

JAVASCRIPT
const now = new Date();

const year = now.getFullYear();
const month = ("0" + (now.getMonth() + 1)).slice(-2);
const day = ("0" + now.getDate()).slice(-2);

const hour = ("0" + now.getHours()).slice(-2);
const minute = ("0" + now.getMinutes()).slice(-2);
const second = ("0" + now.getSeconds()).slice(-2);

// YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss
const formatted = `${year}-${month}-${day} ${hour}:${minute}:${second}`;

Get the Current Timestamp

You can get the current timestamp in milliseconds since Unix epoch using the getTime() method.

JAVASCRIPT
const now = new Date();

const timestamp = now.getTime();

You can then divide the timestamp by 1000 to get the number of seconds since the Unix epoch.

JAVASCRIPT
const now = new Date();

const timestamp = now.getTime();
const seconds = timestamp / 1000;

Another way to get the current timestamp is to use the Date.now() method.

JAVASCRIPT
const timestamp = Date.now();

Get the Date and Time from Timestamp

Given a timestamp, you can pass it to the Date constructor to get a new Date object from it.

From there you can format the date object.

JAVASCRIPT
const now = new Date();
const milliseconds = now.getTime();

const date = new Date(milliseconds);

const year = date.getFullYear();
const month = ("0" + (date.getMonth() + 1)).slice(-2);
const day = ("0" + date.getDate()).slice(-2);

// YYYY-MM-DD
const formatted = `${year}-${month}-${day}`;

Conclusion

We've seen how to get the current date and time in Node. We've also seen how to format the date and time in any format you want, like YYYY-MM-DD and YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss.

Hopefully, this post has been useful to you!

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