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Handling Dates in JavaScript the Clean Way with Luxon

Handling dates in JavaScript can quickly become a nightmare, especially when dealing with timezones. While building Max Explorer, I discovered how unreliable native Date objects could be — leading to subtle bugs. In this article, I share how switching to Luxon, a modern date-time library, helped me build clean and reliable date logic, and how I centralized it into a production-ready utility module.

Tech Stack

JavaScript

Why I Needed Better Date Management

While building Max Explorer, a train itinerary search engine, I ran into a familiar developer pain: handling dates in JavaScript.

To calculate connections and available train options, I had to deal with departure and return dates precisely. But using native Date objects quickly became a problem. JavaScript tends to interpret dates relative to the server’s local timezone, which led to some unexpected behavior:

new Date('2025-04-15')
// → Returns April 14th at 20:00 depending on the server's timezone

This was clearly not sustainable. So I looked for a reliable, readable, and modern library. That's when I found Luxon.

What is Luxon?

Luxon is a modern JavaScript library for working with dates and times. Created by one of the Moment.js authors, it offers:

  • A clean, chainable, and object-oriented API
  • First-class timezone support
  • Native parsing and formatting of ISO strings
  • Great support for formatting, comparisons, and math operations

Perfect for backend use and clean architecture projects.

Installing Luxon

npm install luxon

Production-Friendly Utility: dateUtils.ts

To keep things clean and reusable across my codebase, I created a small utility module using Luxon:

// libs/dateUtils.ts

import { DateTime, DurationLikeObject } from 'luxon'

const DEFAULT_ZONE = 'Europe/Paris'

export const parseISODate = (iso: string): DateTime => {
  return DateTime.fromISO(iso, { zone: DEFAULT_ZONE })
}

export const fromJSDate = (date: Date): DateTime => {
  return DateTime.fromJSDate(date, { zone: DEFAULT_ZONE })
}

export const toUTCJSDate = (dt: DateTime): Date => {
  return dt.toUTC().toJSDate()
}

export const addDuration = (dt: DateTime, duration: DurationLikeObject): DateTime => {
  return dt.plus(duration)
}

export const isBefore = (dt1: DateTime, dt2: DateTime): boolean => {
  return dt1.toUTC() < dt2.toUTC()
}

Example usage:

import { parseISODate, addDuration, toUTCJSDate } from '~/libs/dateUtils'

const departure = parseISODate('2025-04-15')
const returnDate = addDuration(departure, { days: 8 })

console.log('Departure:', toUTCJSDate(departure))
console.log('Return:', toUTCJSDate(returnDate))

Key Takeaways

  • Native Date is unreliable when it comes to timezones — avoid it when possible.
  • Luxon gives you full control over timezones, parsing, and date manipulation.
  • Centralize logic in a utility (dateUtils.ts) to keep your code maintainable and testable.
  • Ideal for clean architecture projects where framework-agnostic logic is a priority.