Get Unix Time in Go (Time Since Epoch)

Unix time is the number of seconds since ‘Epoch’ (00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970). It’s a widely adopted way of representing time in a simple, uniform, manner - as it’s an integer and not a string. Because of it’s simplicity, it also used it many programming languages.

In Go, you can easily access it from the time package by getting the current time, then calling the Unix() function.

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package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "time"
)

func main() {

    // Get the current time and convert 
    // to Unix time (seconds since January 1, 1970)
    unixTime := time.Now().Unix()

    fmt.Println("Current Unix Time in seconds:", unixTime)
}

Alternatives:

Below are two alternatives which offer greater precision, but also more store (as they will be larger numbers).

Milliseconds

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time.Now().UnixMilli()

Nanoseconds

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time.Now().UnixNano()

As String

The Unix() function will return the time as an int64, but there are occasions where you need it as a string, either to pass to other services or for saving purposes. One of the simpler ways of achieving this is by using Sprint() to convert to int64 into a string.

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fmt.Sprint(time.Now().Unix())

Example In Action