How to Set Date Time from Mac Command Line

By  on  

Working on a web extension that ships to an app store and isn't immediately modifiable, like a website, can be difficult. Since you cannot immediately deploy updates, you sometimes need to bake in hardcoded date-based logic. Testing future dates can be difficult if you don't know how to quickly change the date on your local machine.

To change the current date on your Mac, execute the following from command line:

# Date Format:  MMDDYYYY
sudo date -I 06142024

This command does not modify time, only the current date. Using the same command to reset to current date is easy as well!

Recent Features

  • By
    Designing for Simplicity

    Before we get started, it's worth me spending a brief moment introducing myself to you. My name is Mark (or @integralist if Twitter happens to be your communication tool of choice) and I currently work for BBC News in London England as a principal engineer/tech...

  • By
    LightFace:  Facebook Lightbox for MooTools

    One of the web components I've always loved has been Facebook's modal dialog.  This "lightbox" isn't like others:  no dark overlay, no obnoxious animating to size, and it doesn't try to do "too much."  With Facebook's dialog in mind, I've created LightFace:  a Facebook lightbox...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

  1. Richard

    I didn’t understand your exact use case, but a helpful way to do date-related testing without modifying your actual computer date/time, is to shim the system calls with library pre-loading. On a Mac, dyld can do this with DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH. On Linux, GNU ld can do it with LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

    This makes it easy to write tests for specific situations, such as monthly changeovers, leap-occurrences, timezones, etc.

    “libfaketime” is a handy library written for this, https://github.com/wolfcw/libfaketime. It’s even packaged in homebrew, just do brew install libfaketime. :)

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!