Trying to convert Firebase timestamp to NSDate in Swift

ServerValue.timestamp() works a little differently than setting normal data in Firebase. It does not actually provide a timestamp. Instead, it provides a value which tells the Firebase server to fill in that node with the time. By using this, your app's timestamps will all come from one source, Firebase, instead of whatever the user's device happens to say.

When you get the value back (from a observer), you'll get the time as milliseconds since the epoch. You'll need to convert it to seconds to create an NSDate. Here's a snippet of code:

let ref = Firebase(url: "<FIREBASE HERE>")

// Tell the server to set the current timestamp at this location.
ref.setValue(ServerValue.timestamp()) 

// Read the value at the given location. It will now have the time.
ref.observeEventType(.Value, withBlock: { 
    snap in
    if let t = snap.value as? NSTimeInterval {
        // Cast the value to an NSTimeInterval
        // and divide by 1000 to get seconds.
        println(NSDate(timeIntervalSince1970: t/1000))
    }
})

You may find that you get two events raised with very close timestamps. This is because the SDK will take a best "guess" at the timestamp before it hears back from Firebase. Once it hears the actual value from Firebase, it will raise the Value event again.

For me in swift 5 use in another class:

import FirebaseFirestore
init?(document: QueryDocumentSnapshot) {
        let data = document.data()
       guard let stamp = data["timeStamp"] as? Timestamp else {
            return nil
        }
       let date = stamp.dateValue()
}

This question is old, but I recently had the same problem so I'll provide an answer.

Here you can see how I am saving a timestamp to Firebase Database

 let feed = ["userID": uid,
             "pathToImage": url.absoluteString,
             "likes": 0,
             "author": Auth.auth().currentUser!.displayName!,
             "postDescription": self.postText.text ?? "No Description",
             "timestamp": [".sv": "timestamp"],
             "postID": key] as [String: Any]

 let postFeed = ["\(key)" : feed]

 ref.child("posts").updateChildValues(postFeed)

The particularly relevant line of code is "timestamp": [".sv": "timestamp"],

This saves the timestamp as a double in your database. This is the time in milliseconds so you need to divide by 1000 in order to get the time in seconds. You can see a sample timestamp in this image.

To convert this double into a Date I wrote the following function:

func convertTimestamp(serverTimestamp: Double) -> String {
        let x = serverTimestamp / 1000
        let date = NSDate(timeIntervalSince1970: x)
        let formatter = DateFormatter()
        formatter.dateStyle = .long
        formatter.timeStyle = .medium

        return formatter.string(from: date as Date)
    }

This gives a timestamp that looks like this: