Add Minutes to a Date in JavaScript or Node.js

Developing applications usually comes with date and timestamp manipulations. You may let users interact with dates or times, like setting a task to be „due in 15 minutes“ or „remind me of X in 30 minutes“.

JavaScript comes with a native Date type allowing you to manipulate dates. This tutorial shows you how to add a given amount of minutes do a date!

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Adding Minutes to a Date in JavaScript

JavaScript’s built-in Date type provides useful methods to interact with dates. The two methods that we want to use manipulating minutes are Date#setMinutes and Date#getMinutes.

The getMinutes returns the current number of minutes of a given date. And the setMinutes method changes the minutes of a given date instance.

Please notice that you can add more than 60 minutes to a date using the setMinutes method. JavaScript will automatically shift the minutes/hour/day/year.

Here’s a sample function adding a given number of minutes to a date:

/**
 * Returns a date instance with added `minutes` of delay.
 *
 * @param {Number} minutes - the number of minutes to add
 * @param {Date|undefined} date
 *
 * @returns {Date}
 */
function addMinutes (minutes, date = new Date()) {  
  if (typeof minutes !== 'number') {
    throw new Error('Invalid "minutes" argument')
  }

  if (!(date instanceof Date)) {
    throw new Error('Invalid "date" argument')
  }

  date.setMinutes(date.getMinutes() + minutes)

  return date
}

You may need to adjust the handling of the second date parameter in case you don’t want to use default value fallback. Currently, the utility function creates a new date instance representing “now” in your local time. Update that handling when you need something different.

Here’s how you can use the addMinutes utility function. The last example adds five minutes to New Year’s eve which requires a minute, hour, day, and year switch and JavaScript handles all that for us:

addMinutes(1)  
// Tue Nov 15 2022 07:27:53 GMT+0100

addMinutes(40)  
// Tue Nov 15 2022 06:06:53 GMT+0100

addMinutes(180)  
// Tue Nov 15 2022 11:06:53 GMT+0100

addMinutes(5, new Date('2022-12-31 23:59'))  
// Sun Jan 01 2023 00:04:00 GMT+0100

Enjoy!


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