Javascript - How to Get Current time and Date of specific country? eg: New Zealand.

Question

I'm currently working on a MERN stack application and it's hosted through AWS EC2.

So when I try to get the current date/time using Node, I get the server's date and time.

How can I get the current time of a specific country/timezone on the server?

Answer 1

There are couple of options you have.

1. Modify the EC2 instances timezone and send it to the client browser.
2. Calculate the New Zealand time from web browser clients timezone.

If you follow the 1st option you can get the server UTC time using a HTTP request.

For the 2nd option, you need to calculate the time for New Zealand using JavaScript in client's browser.

// create Date object for current location
var date = new Date();

// convert to milliseconds, add local time zone offset and get UTC time in milliseconds
var utcTime = date.getTime() + (date.getTimezoneOffset() * 60000);

// time offset for New Zealand is +12
var timeOffset = 12;

// create new Date object for a different timezone using supplied its GMT offset.
var NewZealandTime = new Date(utcTime + (3600000 * timeOffset));

Note: This won't reflect Daylight Saving Time.

Answer 2

Use a third party api to show time from a specific country. You can use api from worldtimeapi.org/. Make an ajax call, get the time of your desired location. You can use plain javascript or use any ajax library to do that. Here I'm including two methods: 1) plain javascript and 2) using axios

VANILLA JS

function getTime(url) {
    return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
        const req = new XMLHttpRequest();
        req.open("GET", url);
        req.onload = () =>
            req.status === 200
                ? resolve(req.response)
                : reject(Error(req.statusText));
        req.onerror = (e) => reject(Error(`Network Error: ${e}`));
        req.send();
    });
}

Now Use this function to make the ajax call

let url = "http://worldtimeapi.org/api/timezone/Pacific/Auckland";

getTime(url)
    .then((response) => {
        let dateObj = JSON.parse(response);
        let dateTime = dateObj.datetime;
        console.log(dateObj);
        console.log(dateTime);
    })
    .catch((err) => {
        console.log(err);
    });

AXIOS

axios({
    url:"http://worldtimeapi.org/api/timezone/Pacific/Auckland",
    method: "get",
})
    .then((response) => {
        let dateObj = response.data;
        let dateTime = dateObj.datetime;
        console.log(dateObj);
        console.log(dateTime);
    })
    .catch((err) => {
        console.log(err);
    });

Hope that helps. Bear one thing in mind though, worldtimeapi.org/ is a third party service. If they choose to terminate their service, your code will break. Happy coding.