Set the date/time for a python script in linux

Question

I am unit testing a python script and want to simulate the running of the script on different days of the month.

Is there any way to set the date/time for when launching the script from the command line?

I do not have access to change the system date/time, and would prefer to not hack the script with the dates I want to test for.

Cheers, Donal

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 24 '13 at 09:50

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Just found the solution, use a linux tool called faketime.

[10:45:03] $ faketime '2008-12-24 08:15:42' /bin/date
Wed Dec 24 08:15:42 GMT 2008

answered Sep 24 '13 at 09:50

Donal M

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I tried when I wrote it, but it won't let me accept my own answer for another two days. – Donal M Sep 24 '13 at 13:30

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:56

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You may probably achieve this by some LD_PRELOAD trick, but in my opinion much cleaner solution is to mock datetime.date class. For more details you may check answers to this question

edited May 23 '17 at 11:56

Community

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answered Sep 24 '13 at 09:56

RobertT

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 24 '13 at 09:50

I don't think there is a way to directly set the date/time in a shell so that the system time is unaltered but different for a sub shell

However there are two solutions

1) for a limited set of different times you can use TZ, example

TZ="GMT+6" date

2) run the python programs in a VM like Virtualbox and do set the system time. In the VM!

Set the date/time for a python script in linux

3 Answers3