Generating Random Date and Time with PHP

Actually title tells everything. Firstly I want to show you how you can generate random date.

<?php

$timestamp = mt_rand(1, time());
$randomDate = date('Y-m-d', $timestamp);
echo $randomDate;

In this way it will be created a random date since 1970. Let keep this in pocket and let's try to generate a date between two specified date.

<?php

$start = strtotime('2018-01-01');
$end = time();
$timestamp = mt_rand($start, $end);

echo date('Y-m-d', $timestamp);

In the example above it will create a date from 1/1/2018 to present day. I indicated the 2.date as present but you may write strtotime() and  include a specific a date for 2.date.

Also if you want to show the time with date use date() function in this way;

echo date('Y-m-d H:i:s', $timestamp);

Let's look how can we generate random time. We create a random number between 1 and 86400. 86400=24hour X 60min X 60sec

<?php

$start = 1;
$end = 60 * 60 * 24;
$timestamp = mt_rand($start, $end);
echo date('H:i:s', $timestamp);

Maybe you may say what i can do with this? Don't worry when the time came it will be a information that you will enjoy when you are learning :) Why did it work for me? For a project i had to enter a dummy data and to create weekly, monthly, yearly charts, these data had to be entered on random dates.In this way I created dummy datas by creating random dates, and it worked for me today,  let's see tomorrow which one of you will handle your job with this? :)