How to Set Date Time from Mac Command Line
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!
![Detect DOM Node Insertions with JavaScript and CSS Animations]()
I work with an awesome cast of developers at Mozilla, and one of them in Daniel Buchner. Daniel's shared with me an awesome strategy for detecting when nodes have been injected into a parent node without using the deprecated DOM Events API.
![How to Create a Twitter Card]()
One of my favorite social APIs was the Open Graph API adopted by Facebook. Adding just a few META tags to each page allowed links to my article to be styled and presented the way I wanted them to, giving me a bit of control...
![HTML5 Input Types Alternative]()
As you may know, HTML5 has introduced several new input types: number, date, color, range, etc. The question is: should you
start using these controls or not? As much as I want to say "Yes", I think they are not yet ready for any real life...
![MooTools History Plugin]()
One of the reasons I love AJAX technology so much is because it allows us to avoid unnecessary page loads. Why download the header, footer, and other static data multiple times if that specific data never changes? It's a waste of time, processing, and bandwidth. Unfortunately...
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. :)