How do you do relative time in Rails?

Question

I\'m writing a Rails application, but can\'t seem to find how to do relative time, i.e. if given a certain Time class, it can calculate \"30 seconds ago\" or \"2 days ago\"

Answer 1

Just to clarify Andrew Marshall's solution for using time_ago_in_words
(For Rails 3.0 and Rails 4.0)

If you are in a view

<%= time_ago_in_words(Date.today - 1) %>

If you are in a controller

include ActionView::Helpers::DateHelper
def index
  @sexy_date = time_ago_in_words(Date.today - 1)
end

Controllers do not have the module ActionView::Helpers::DateHelper imported by default.

N.B. It is not "the rails way" to import helpers into your controllers. Helpers are for helping views. The time_ago_in_words method was decided to be a view entity in the MVC triad. (I don't agree but when in rome...)