Ruby/Rails: converting a Date to a UNIX timestamp

The code date.to_time.to_i should work fine. The Rails console session below shows an example:

>> Date.new(2009,11,26).to_time
=> Thu Nov 26 00:00:00 -0800 2009
>> Date.new(2009,11,26).to_time.to_i
=> 1259222400
>> Time.at(1259222400)
=> Thu Nov 26 00:00:00 -0800 2009

Note that the intermediate DateTime object is in local time, so the timestamp might be several hours off from what you expect. If you want to work in UTC time, you can use DateTime’s method “utc”.