How to manage DateTime with Carbon in Laravel?

In Laravel, you can use the Carbon library to manage dates and times. Carbon is a PHP library that provides an easy-to-use and powerful set of functions for working with dates and times.

To use Carbon in Laravel, you can install it using Composer:

composer require nesbot/carbon

Then, you can use the Carbon class to create a new DateTime object:

use Carbon\Carbon;

$now = Carbon::now();

This will create a new DateTime object representing the current date and time.

You can also create a DateTime object from a string using the parse method:

$date = Carbon::parse('2022-12-27');

This will create a new DateTime object representing the date 2022-12-27.

Once you have a DateTime object, you can use the various methods of the Carbon class to manipulate and format the date and time. For example, you can use the format method to format the date as a string:

echo $date->format('Y-m-d'); // output: 2022-12-27

You can also use the various methods of the Carbon class to perform operations on dates and times, such as adding or subtracting time, comparing dates, and more. For example, you can use the addDays method to add days to a date:

$newDate = $date->addDays(7);
echo $newDate->format('Y-m-d'); // output: 2023-01-03

Few more examples with Carbon.

Work with Years

$now = Carbon::now(); //2022-12-27

//Add one year
$now->addYear(); //This will output 2023-12-27

//Add multiple years
$now->addYears(5); //This will output 2027-12-27

// Substract years
$now->subYear(); 

// Substract multiple years
$now->subYears(5);

Work with months

$now = Carbon::now(); //2022-12-27

//add one month
$now->addMonth();

//add multiple months
$now->addMonths(2);

//sub one month
$now->subMonth();

// sub multiple months
$now->subMonths(5);

Work with Days

$now = Carbon::now(); //2022-12-27

//Add one day
$now->addDay();

//add multiple days
$now->addDays();

//sub one day
$now->subDay();

//sub multiple days
$now->subDays(2);

You can find a full list of the methods available in the Carbon library in the Carbon documentation.

Using Carbon can make it much easier to work with dates and times in Laravel, as it provides a convenient and powerful set of tools for manipulating and formatting dates and times.