Laravel bundles Carbon (https://github.com/briannesbitt/Carbon), which extends and augments PHP's native DateTime object with more expressive methods. Laravel uses it mainly to provide more expressive methods on the date and time properties (created_at, updated_at, and deleted_at) of an Eloquent object. However, since the library is already there, it would be a shame not to use it elsewhere in the code of your application.
Carbon objects are meant to be instantiated like normal DateTime objects. They do, however, support a handful of more expressive methods:
Carbon objects can be instantiated using the default constructor that will use the current date and time as follows:
$now = new Carbon();
They can be instantiated using the current date and time in a given timezone as follows:
$jetzt = new Carbon('Europe/Berlin');
They can be instantiated using expressive methods as follows:
$yesterday = Carbon::yesterday();$demain = Carbon::tomorrow('Europe/Paris');
They can be instantiated using exact parameters as follows:
Carbon::createFromDate($year, $month, $day, $tz);Carbon::createFromTime($hour, $minute, $second, $tz);Carbon::create($year, $month, $day, $hour, $minute, $second, $tz);
We can generate human-readable, relative timestamps such as 5 minutes ago, last week, or in a year with the diffForHumans() method as follows:
$post = App\Post::find(123); echo $post->created_at->diffForHumans();
Carbon also provides a handful of simple and expressive methods that will come in handy in your controllers and views:
$date->isWeekday();$date->isWeekend();$date->isYesterday();$date->isToday();$date->isTomorrow();$date->isFuture();$date->isPast();$date->isLeapYear();
To be able to call Carbon's methods on attributes stored as DATE or DATETIME types in the database, you need to list them in a $dates property in the model:
class Post extends Model {
// ...
protected $dates = [
'published_at',
'deleted_at',
];
}
You don't need to include created_at or updated_at, as these are automatically treated as dates.