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::Lorem.words, description: Faker::Lorem.sentence, start_date: Random.date)

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2410639/best-way-to-create-random-datetime-in-rails

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