Best way to create random DateTime in Rails

Question

What is the best way to generate a random DateTime in Ruby/Rails? Trying to create a nice seeds.rb file. Going to use it like so:

 Foo.create(name: Faker::Lo         


        

Answer 1

Here is how to create a date in the last 10 years:

rand(10.years).ago

You can also get a date in the future:

rand(10.years).from_now

Update – Rails 4.1+

Rails 4.1 has deprecated the implicit conversion from Numeric => seconds when you call .ago, which the above code depends on. See Rails PR #12389 for more information about this. To avoid a deprecation warning in Rails 4.1 you need to do an explicit conversion to seconds, like so:

rand(10.years).seconds.ago