date-fns

What is date-fns?

The date-fns npm package provides a comprehensive, yet simple and consistent toolset for manipulating JavaScript dates in a browser & Node.js. It offers a variety of functions to parse, validate, manipulate, and format dates.

What are date-fns's main functionalities?

Parsing Dates

Parse strings in ISO format to JavaScript Date objects.

const parseISO = require('date-fns/parseISO');
const result = parseISO('2023-04-12');

Formatting Dates

Format Date objects into strings with a given format.

const format = require('date-fns/format');
const result = format(new Date(2023, 3, 12), 'yyyy-MM-dd');

Comparing Dates

Compare two dates to determine if one comes before the other.

const isBefore = require('date-fns/isBefore');
const result = isBefore(new Date(2023, 3, 12), new Date(2023, 3, 13));

Manipulating Dates

Perform date calculations such as adding or subtracting time spans.

const addDays = require('date-fns/addDays');
const result = addDays(new Date(2023, 3, 12), 10);

Validating Dates

Check if a date is valid.

const isValid = require('date-fns/isValid');
const result = isValid(new Date('2023-04-12'));

Other packages similar to date-fns

moment

Moment.js is a legacy project, now in maintenance mode, which provides similar functionalities for parsing, validating, manipulating, and formatting dates. It's more object-oriented and mutable compared to the functional and immutable design of date-fns.

dayjs

Day.js is a lightweight date library that offers a similar API to Moment.js but with a smaller footprint. It is immutable and chainable, like date-fns, but with a different plugin system for extending functionality.

luxon

Luxon is a powerful, modern, and chainable library for working with dates and times. It offers a rich set of features for parsing, formatting, manipulating, and querying dates. It's built on the Intl API and provides time zone support out of the box, which is more comprehensive than date-fns's approach to time zones.

README

🔥️ NEW: date-fns v4.0 with first-class time zone support is out!

date-fns provides the most comprehensive, yet simple and consistent toolset for manipulating JavaScript dates in a browser & Node.js

👉 Documentation

👉 Blog

It's like Lodash for dates

• It has 200+ functions for all occasions.
• Modular: Pick what you need. Works with webpack, Browserify, or Rollup and also supports tree-shaking.
• Native dates: Uses existing native type. It doesn't extend core objects for safety's sake.
• Immutable & Pure: Built using pure functions and always returns a new date instance.
• TypeScript: The library is 100% TypeScript with brand-new handcrafted types.
• I18n: Dozens of locales. Include only what you need.
• and many more benefits

import { compareAsc, format } from "date-fns";

format(new Date(2014, 1, 11), "yyyy-MM-dd");
//=> '2014-02-11'

const dates = [
  new Date(1995, 6, 2),
  new Date(1987, 1, 11),
  new Date(1989, 6, 10),
];
dates.sort(compareAsc);
//=> [
//   Wed Feb 11 1987 00:00:00,
//   Mon Jul 10 1989 00:00:00,
//   Sun Jul 02 1995 00:00:00
// ]

The library is available as an npm package. To install the package run:

npm install date-fns --save

Docs

See date-fns.org for more details, API, and other docs.

License

MIT © Sasha Koss

Changelog

v4.1.0 - 2024-09-17

This release adds time zone support to format functions (that I somehow missed when working on the feature) and fixes a few bugs.

Make sure also upgrade TZDate to v1.0.2 as it includes a bunch of critical bug fixes.

Fixed

• Fixed internal constructFrom throwing an exception on null arguments. While null isn't allowed, the functions should rather return Invalid Date or NaN in such cases. See #3885.

Added

• Added missing time zone support to format, formatISO, formatISO9075, formatRelative and formatRFC3339. See #3886.