How to format time since xxx e.g. “4 minutes ago” similar to Stack Exchange sites

Question

The question is how to format a JavaScript Date as a string stating the time elapsed similar to the way you see times displayed on Stack Overflow.

e.g.<

Answer 1

Here is a slight modification on Sky Sander's solution that allows the date to be input as a string and is capable of displaying spans like "1 minute" instead of "73 seconds"

var timeSince = function(date) {
  if (typeof date !== 'object') {
    date = new Date(date);
  }

  var seconds = Math.floor((new Date() - date) / 1000);
  var intervalType;

  var interval = Math.floor(seconds / 31536000);
  if (interval >= 1) {
    intervalType = 'year';
  } else {
    interval = Math.floor(seconds / 2592000);
    if (interval >= 1) {
      intervalType = 'month';
    } else {
      interval = Math.floor(seconds / 86400);
      if (interval >= 1) {
        intervalType = 'day';
      } else {
        interval = Math.floor(seconds / 3600);
        if (interval >= 1) {
          intervalType = "hour";
        } else {
          interval = Math.floor(seconds / 60);
          if (interval >= 1) {
            intervalType = "minute";
          } else {
            interval = seconds;
            intervalType = "second";
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }

  if (interval > 1 || interval === 0) {
    intervalType += 's';
  }

  return interval + ' ' + intervalType;
};
var aDay = 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000;
console.log(timeSince(new Date(Date.now() - aDay)));
console.log(timeSince(new Date(Date.now() - aDay * 2)));