How to fake Time.now?

Question

What\'s the best way to set Time.now for the purpose of testing time-sensitive methods in a unit test?

Answer 1

Depending upon what you are comparing Time.now to, sometimes you can change your fixtures to accomplish the same goal or test the same feature. For example, I had a situation where I needed one thing to happen if some date was in the future and another to happen if it was in the past. What I was able to do was include in my fixtures some embedded ruby (erb):

future:
    comparing_date: <%= Time.now + 10.years %>
    ...

past:
    comparing_date: <%= Time.now - 10.years %>
    ...

Then in your tests then you choose which one to use to test the different features or actions based upon the time relative to Time.now.