A neat little utility for working with relative times in JavaScript.

(2).days.ago(); // Sat Jan 03 2015 18:00:00 GMT+0000 (GMT)

Neat.

I stole the name from Timerizer, which is written in Ruby and based on Ruby on Rails' ActiveSupport, which is also what this was based on.

Either download the repo and just include timerizer.js or build/timerizer.min.js into your project (using AMD, CommonJS or just good old globals), or install through npm using npm install timerizer.

There are two main ways to call Timerizer; you can either use the Timerizer constructor function, or you can call one of the time methods directly on number objects.

Timerizer(4).weeks.ago();

// Or you can call it directly on numbers
(4).weeks.ago();

This does involve adding a load of properties to Number.prototype—if this concerns you, there will be a way to disable that behaviour soon.

Time methods are the ones you call on the number, and are specifying the type of interval of time.

The available time methods are seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, and fortnights. There are also singular versions of all those methods.

(4).seconds.ago();
(10).hours.ago();
(1).fortnight.ago();

(I don't like this name. Feel free to suggest better.)

The calculation methods are four methods used to get the actual Date object.

We've met one of these already, the .ago() method. The following will return a Date object for four hours ago:

(4).hours.ago();

Pretty simple. You can also give it an argument containing a time to generate the Date from: e.g., you can specify that you want the time two hours before a given time. That doesn't make much sense as the ago method, so there is an until method aliased to ago:

(4).hours.until(myTime);

The two methods for getting times in the future are called fromNow and since, and they behave in pretty much the same way that the methods for getting times in the past do.

(4).hours.fromNow();
(4).hours.since(myTime);

If you want to contribute (thank you!), you'll need to clone the repository and install the dependencies using npm install. Run the tests before sending a pull request (npm test), and try to avoid sending a pull request from the master branch.

This library is released under an MIT license.