How to fake Time.now?

Question

What\'s the best way to set Time.now for the purpose of testing time-sensitive methods in a unit test?

Answer 1

Personally I prefer to make the clock injectable, like so:

def hello(clock=Time)
  puts "the time is now: #{clock.now}"
end

Or:

class MyClass
  attr_writer :clock

  def initialize
    @clock = Time
  end

  def hello
    puts "the time is now: #{@clock.now}"
  end
end

However, many prefer to use a mocking/stubbing library. In RSpec/flexmock you can use:

Time.stub!(:now).and_return(Time.mktime(1970,1,1))

Or in Mocha:

Time.stubs(:now).returns(Time.mktime(1970,1,1))

Answer 2

i just have this in my test file:

   def time_right_now
      current_time = Time.parse("07/09/10 14:20")
      current_time = convert_time_to_utc(current_date)
      return current_time
    end

and in my Time_helper.rb file i have a

  def time_right_now
    current_time= Time.new
    return current_time
  end

so when testing the time_right_now is overwritten to use what ever time you want it to be.