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!
![Chris Coyier’s Favorite CodePen Demos]()
David asked me if I'd be up for a guest post picking out some of my favorite Pens from CodePen. A daunting task! There are so many! I managed to pick a few though that have blown me away over the past few months. If you...
![5 HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed]()
When you say or read "HTML5", you half expect exotic dancers and unicorns to walk into the room to the tune of "I'm Sexy and I Know It." Can you blame us though? We watched the fundamental APIs stagnate for so long that a basic feature...
![PHP IMDB Scraper]()
It's been quite a while since I've written a PHP grabber and the itch finally got to me. This time the victim is the International Movie Database, otherwise known as IMDB. IMDB has info on every movie ever made (or so it seems). Their...
![Digg-Style Dynamic Share Widget Using the Dojo Toolkit]()
I've always seen Digg as a very progressive website. Digg uses experimental, ajaxified methods for comments and mission-critical functions. One nice touch Digg has added to their website is their hover share widget. Here's how to implement that functionality on your site...
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. :)