How to Get Current Time in UTC in Ruby

1. Use Time.now in Ruby
2. Time Formatting Directives
3. Time Arithmetic in Ruby

This article will tackle the time class act for dates and times in Ruby.

Use Time.now in Ruby

The operating system provides date and time functionality. Before 1970 or after 2038, this class may be unable on our system to represent dates.

You can use the Time.now in Ruby to represent a time and date. The three components of a date are Day, Month, and Year.

Talking about time also has three components: Hours, Minutes, and Seconds.

We can create a Time object using a Unix timestamp at the method, and you can give the starting date in numbers to Time.new (Format: year/month/day). We can get an object representing the current time using Time.now.

Example Code:

# Ruby
time1 = Time.new
puts 'Current Time : ' + time1.inspect

time2 = Time.now
puts 'Current Time : ' + time2.inspect

Output:

Time objects are used to get various components of date and time.

Example Code:

# Ruby
time = Time.new

Output:

The following list is other methods used for different functions.

1. time.inspect - get the current time of the day.
2. time.year - get the year of the date.
3. time.month - get the month of the date.
4. time.wday - get the day of the week. The value can range from 1 to 7.
5. time.yday - get the day of the year. The value can range from 11 to 365.
6. time.hour - get the hour with the format of a 24-hour clock.
7. time.min - get the value of the minutes.
8. time.sec - get the value of the seconds.
9. time.usec - get the microseconds.
10. time.zone - get the zone of the time.

The UTCTime.utc, Time.gm, and Time.local functions are used in a standard format to format data. In the syntax below, we get all the components in an array.

# ruby
[seconds, minutes, hour, day, month, year, wday, yday, isdst, zone]

Example Code:

# Ruby
time = Time.new
values = time.to_a
puts values

Output:

Time objects are used to get various components of date and time.

Example Code:

# Ruby
time = Time.new
values = time.to_a
puts Time.utc(*values)

Output:

We can use time objects to get all the time zones and daylight savings information.

# ruby
time = Time.new

If we want to format times and dates, There are many ways to format dates and times.

Example Code:

# Ruby
time = Time.new
puts time
puts time.ctime
puts time.localtime
puts time.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')

Output:

Time Formatting Directives

The following directives are used with the method time.

Time Arithmetic in Ruby

We can do simple arithmetic with time, such as follows.

Example Code:

# Ruby
now = Time.now
puts now

past = now - 10
puts past

future = now + 10
puts future

diff = future - past
puts diff

Output: