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
    CSS Gradients

    With CSS border-radius, I showed you how CSS can bridge the gap between design and development by adding rounded corners to elements.  CSS gradients are another step in that direction.  Now that CSS gradients are supported in Internet Explorer 8+, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome...

  • By
    Responsive Images: The Ultimate Guide

    Chances are that any Web designers using our Ghostlab browser testing app, which allows seamless testing across all devices simultaneously, will have worked with responsive design in some shape or form. And as today's websites and devices become ever more varied, a plethora of responsive images...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Assign Anchor IDs Using MooTools 1.2

    One of my favorite uses of the MooTools JavaScript library is the SmoothScroll plugin. I use it on my website, my employer's website, and on many customer websites. The best part about the plugin is that it's so easy to implement. I recently ran...

  • By
    Create Twitter-Style Dropdowns Using MooTools

    Twitter does some great stuff with JavaScript. What I really appreciate about what they do is that there aren't any epic JS functionalities -- they're all simple touches. One of those simple touches is the "Login" dropdown on their homepage. I've taken...

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!