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)

Answer 1

Here are set of methods for generating a random integer, amount, time/datetime within a range.

def rand_int(from, to)
  rand_in_range(from, to).to_i
end

def rand_price(from, to)
  rand_in_range(from, to).round(2)
end

def rand_time(from, to=Time.now)
  Time.at(rand_in_range(from.to_f, to.to_f))
end

def rand_in_range(from, to)
  rand * (to - from) + from
end

Now you can make the following calls.

rand_int(60, 75)
# => 61

rand_price(10, 100)
# => 43.84

rand_time(2.days.ago)
# => Mon Mar 08 21:11:56 -0800 2010