NOW() function in PHP

Not besides the date function:

date("Y-m-d H:i:s");

date('Y-m-d H:i:s')

Look here for more details: http://pl.php.net/manual/en/function.date.php

With PHP version >= 5.4 DateTime can do this:-

echo (new \DateTime())->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');

See it working.