Display date/time created in Ruby on Rails

Displaying the time and date something was created is a super simple thing to do in Rails, once you find out how! Took me a while to find the solution from Googling, so I figured I’d write a short little tutorial here on how to do it.

So basically I am coding the tutorials section of Sidecar and wanted to show when a tutorial was created. Here’s how to do it without touching the model or controller:

In your view, you can simply use created_at to output the date/time an item was added to the database. So within your loop (i.e. <% @tutorials.each do |tutorial| %>…) just put <%= tutorial.created_at %>. This will output something like this: ‘2013-04-20 01:32:11 UTC’. Clearly not what we want as it’s hard to read and unconventional. We can format the output of the date by using ‘.strftime’ appended to ‘.created_at’. Like this: <%= tutorial.created_at.strftime("%b %d, %Y") %>, which will output ‘Apr 20, 2013’.

You can find a list of all the strftime formats here