Best way to create random DateTime in Rails

Question

What is the best way to generate a random DateTime in Ruby/Rails? Trying to create a nice seeds.rb file. Going to use it like so:

 Foo.create(name: Faker::Lo         


        

Answer 1

You can pass Time Range to rand

rand(10.weeks.ago..1.day.ago)

Output Example:

=> Fri, 10 Jan 2020 10:28:52 WIB +07:00

Answer 2

My 'ish' gem provides a nice way of handling this:

# plus/minus 5 min of input date
Time.now.ish
# override that time range like this
Time.now.ish(:offset => 1.year)

https://github.com/spilliton/ish

Answer 3

Here is how to create a date in the last 10 years:

rand(10.years).ago

You can also get a date in the future:

rand(10.years).from_now

Update – Rails 4.1+

Rails 4.1 has deprecated the implicit conversion from Numeric => seconds when you call .ago, which the above code depends on. See Rails PR #12389 for more information about this. To avoid a deprecation warning in Rails 4.1 you need to do an explicit conversion to seconds, like so:

rand(10.years).seconds.ago

Answer 4

This is what I use:

# get random DateTime in last 3 weeks
DateTime.now - (rand * 21)

Answer 5

I haven't tried this myself but you could create a random integer between two dates using the number of seconds since epoch. For example, to get a random date for the last week.

end = Time.now
start = (end - 1.week).to_i
random_date = Time.at(rand(end.to_i - start)) + start

Of course you end up with a Time object instead of a DateTime but I'm sure you can covert from here.

Answer 6

I prefer use (1..500).to_a.rand.days.ago