Time travelling in rspec/rails

When basing logic on the current time its helpful for testing to have a stable time. A time that does not change. Rails has a module ActiveSupport::Testing::TimeHelpers that was added in Rails 4.2 to provide methods that manipulate the time during testing.

travel_to(Time.parse("2017-01-19")) do
  puts Time.now.strftime(:date)
end

puts Time.now.strftime(:date)

The above code outputs 2017-01-19 and 2017-05-02 (the current date). A fun way to time travel in modern ruby.