How to get today's date in vanilla JS

A couple of weeks ago, I was writing a little countdown script. I found myself needing to get today's date in vanilla JS, so let me show you how!

The problem

You may be wondering: why not just call the Date() constructor with no arguments, or use the Date.now() method? The trouble is that both of these methods also include the current time.

I needed to compare two dates at midnight in UTC. If I'd used new Date() or Date.now(), it would have accounted for the hours, minutes, and seconds. My countdown script would have been inaccurate.

Getting today's date

The first thing I did was get today's date string in the format YYYY-MM-DD. This is a valid ISO date string we can pass into the Date() constructor. Here's how I did it:

const dateString = new Date().toISOString().slice(0, 10); // '2021-11-22'

Firstly, I called the Date() constructor. This constructs a Date object representing the current date and time.

Then I called the toISOString() method, which returns a string in the format YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss.sssZ, according to UTC time. Counting from zero, notice that the first nine characters are YYYY-MM-DD, which is exactly what we need.

To extract this string, I called the slice() method. The reason I used 10 for the second index is because this is the index before which we want to stop the slice.

Finally, I assigned the string to the dateString constant.

Constructing the Date object

Now that we have our date string in YYYY-MM-DD format, all we need to do is pass it into the Date() constructor:

const today = new Date(dateString); // Mon Nov 22 2021 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Greenwich Mean Time)

This leaves us with a Date object representing midnight today. To verify this, try calling toISOString() again:

console.log(today.toISOString()); // '2021-11-22T00:00:00.000Z'

A helper function

To make life easier, I've created a helper function you can use:

/**
 * Get today's date.
 * https://gist.github.com/kieranbarker/2c300d73059697a4417e12bd40cdef75
 * @returns {Date} A Date object representing today's date at midnight in UTC.
 */
function getTodaysDate() {
  const dateString = new Date().toISOString().slice(0, 10);
  return new Date(dateString);
}

Comparing two dates

Next week, I'll show you how I used this technique to get the number of days between today and a date in the future.