How to format date using date-fns library in JavaScript?

The date utility or library date-fns provides simple and easy ways to format JavaScript dates in a browser and Node.js.

In our use case, we had the following requirements:

If the date is today, we just needed to print HH:MM of that date. If the date is yesterday or within this week we had to print weekday namea and hour and minute like this: HH:MM

If the date is older than one week, we had to print DD/MM (only and date and month)

By using date-fns utility, we could very easily achieve this. Following is the react code that we wrote to get this done:

import formatRelative from 'date-fns/formatRelative';
import nb from 'date-fns/locale/nb';  // We had to use Norwegian locale

  const formatRelativeLocale = {
    lastWeek: 'eeee HH:mm',
    yesterday: 'eeee HH:mm',
    today: 'HH:mm',
    other: 'dd.MM.yyyy',
  };

  const locale = {
    ...nb,
    formatRelative: (token) => formatRelativeLocale[token],
  };

  return (
    <div className="App">
       {formatRelative(new Date(2014, 1, 11), new Date(), { locale })} // 11.01.2014
    </div>
  );