How to get Current Timestamp from Carbon in Laravel 5

You can try this if you want date time string:

use Carbon\Carbon;
$current_date_time = Carbon::now()->toDateTimeString(); // Produces something like "2019-03-11 12:25:00"

If you want timestamp, you can try:

use Carbon\Carbon;
$current_timestamp = Carbon::now()->timestamp; // Produces something like 1552296328

See the official Carbon documentation here.


You need to add another \ before your carbon class to start in the root namespace.

$current_time = \Carbon\Carbon::now()->toDateTimeString();

Also, make sure Carbon is loaded in your composer.json.


Laravel 5.2 <= 5.5

    use Carbon\Carbon; // You need to import Carbon
    $current_time = Carbon::now()->toDayDateTimeString(); // Wed, May 17, 2017 10:42 PM
    $current_timestamp = Carbon::now()->timestamp; // Unix timestamp 1495062127

In addition, this is how to change datetime format for given date & time, in blade:

{{\Carbon\Carbon::parse($dateTime)->format('D, d M \'y, H:i')}}

Laravel 5.6 <

$current_timestamp = now()->timestamp;

For Laravel 5.5 or above just use the built in helper

$timestamp = now();

If you want a unix timestamp, you can also try this:

$unix_timestamp = now()->timestamp;