Mongoose converting stored UTC dates to local time?

Question

I'm wondering if this is normal, or if I'm missing something in the schema setup or query process:

My app, and mongoose, is correctly storing a date as UTC in mongodb. This is confirmed by viewing the documents via the mongo shell. When I retrieve the documents from mongodb via mongoose the date is now local time.

Is there a way to have mongoose keep the date as UTC when queried?

Answer 1

Mongoose and node.js aren't doing anything to your dates, it's simply that the JavaScript Date type produces a local time string when you call toString() on it even though it actually contains the time in UTC.

Explicitly call toUTCString() on your Date object if you want a UTC time string.

Answer 2

The timestamps are stored timezone agnostically, as a unix timestamp. This timestamp will work across timezones, and node interprets it using your current timezone. You can retrieve the UTC value from the date object using the getUTC* methods such as get getUTCHours()