How to format date and time in Discord bot embed for Australian timezone?

Other Questions Discord bot
1

I’m working on a Discord bot with a kick feature. Everything works fine, but I’m stuck on formatting the date and time in the embed that gets sent to the #incidents channel. Right now, it looks messy and hard to read.

Here’s what my code looks like:

const kickEmbed = new discord.RichEmbed()
  .setTitle('Member Kicked')
  .setDescription(`${kickedUser} was removed from the server.`)
  .setColor('#4287f5')
  .addField('Kick Time', message.createdAt, true)
  .addField('Kicked by', `<@${message.author.id}>`, true)
  .addField('Reason', kickReason, false);

incidentsChannel.send(kickEmbed);

The problem is with the ‘Kick Time’ field. It’s using message.createdAt, but the output is confusing.

I want to change it to show: DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM AM/PM in Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST).

Any ideas on how to format the date and time correctly for my timezone? Thanks!

2

hey mate, i’ve dealt with this before. you’ll wanna use the moment-timezone library. install it with npm, then import it. use it like this:

const moment = require('moment-timezone');
// ...
.addField('Kick Time', moment().tz('Australia/Sydney').format('DD/MM/YYYY hh:mm A'), true)

that should sort ya out for AEST. lemme know if ya need anymore help!

3

Having worked on several Discord bots, I can suggest using the Intl.DateTimeFormat API. It’s built into JavaScript and doesn’t require any extra libraries. Here’s how you can implement it:

const formatter = new Intl.DateTimeFormat('en-AU', {
  timeZone: 'Australia/Sydney',
  day: '2-digit',
  month: '2-digit',
  year: 'numeric',
  hour: '2-digit',
  minute: '2-digit',
  hour12: true
});

const kickTime = formatter.format(message.createdAt);

.addField('Kick Time', kickTime, true)

This approach is lightweight, doesn’t require additional dependencies, and handles daylight saving time automatically. It’s also locale-aware, so it’ll format the date according to Australian conventions.

4

As someone who’s built a few Discord bots, I can attest that date formatting can be a real pain. I’ve found that the date-fns library is incredibly lightweight and perfect for this kind of task. Here’s how I’d approach it:

First, install date-fns with npm:
npm install date-fns date-fns-tz

Then in your code:

const { format, utcToZonedTime } = require('date-fns-tz')

// In your embed creation:
const kickTime = utcToZonedTime(message.createdAt, 'Australia/Sydney')
const formattedTime = format(kickTime, 'dd/MM/yyyy hh:mm a', { timeZone: 'Australia/Sydney' })

.addField('Kick Time', formattedTime, true)

This should give you exactly what you’re after without the bloat of moment.js. It’s also more future-proof as date-fns is actively maintained.