Day.js with RelativeTime in Nuxt.js

This is a relatively short guide, and it's just to show how easy it is to implement day.js inside a Nuxt app.

I've always just used Moment.js for date formatting, but since Moment.js has now been abandoned and they're encouraging people to use alternatives, I needed to find a way to convert timestamps that are provided by the API's I consume. They usually return timestamps in the following format:

2020-10-08T07:51:58Z

Which to be honest, isn't really useful to anyone. That's where day.js comes in, it can convert the timestamp above into something like

Oct 8th 2020

It's pretty simple to do.

First we need to pull in the @nuxtjs/dayjs package with the following command.

yarn add @nuxtjs/dayjs
or
npm install @nuxtjs/dayjs

Once that is installed, open up your nuxt.config.js and add
'@nuxtjs/dayjs' to the modules section, and then outside of that, add the following dayjs object.

modules: [
    '@nuxtjs/dayjs',
    ...
],
dayjs: {
    locales: ['en'],
    defaultLocale: 'en',
    plugins: ['relativeTime', 'advancedFormat'],
},

Set any locales you want, for me, being in the United Kingdom, I set my locale to en and then add any additional dayjs plugins you need. I'm using the RelativeTime and AdvancedFormat plugins.

Once everything is installed, you from within any component you can do the following

{{ $dayjs('2020-10-08T07:51:58Z').format('MMM Do YYYY') }}

Which will output this

Oct 8th 2020

You can also use the RelativeTime plugin to turn it into this:

{{ $dayjs('2020-10-08T07:51:58Z').fromNow() }}

Which will return

a year ago

You can obviously, not use hard-coded dates and use props/variables such as

{{ $dayjs(post.published_at).fromNow() }}

Day.js is a simple and ultra-lightweight replacement for Moment.js and is super easy to use.