In Go time.Time struct is used to represent an instance of time or date. Below are three ways of creating a new time instance

Using time.Now()

time.Now() function can be used to get the current local timestamp. The signature of the function is

func Now() Time

Using time.Date()

time.Date() function takes in year, month, day, hour, min, sec, nanosecond and location and returns a time which is  yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss + nsec with the appropriate timezone corresponding to the given location. The signature of the function is

func Date(year int, month Month, day, hour, min, sec, nsec int, loc *Location) Time

Using time.Parse()

time.Parse() can be used to convert a string representation of time into a time.Time instance. The signature of the function is 

func Parse(layout, value string) (Time, error)

time.Parse function takes in two arguments –

• First argument is the layout consisting of time format placeholder

• Second argument is the actual formatted string representing time.

Below is a working code example demonstrating all the three ways mentioned above

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "time"
)

func main() {
    //time.Now() example
    t := time.Now()
    fmt.Println(t)

    //time.Date() Example
    t = time.Date(2021, time.Month(2), 21, 1, 10, 30, 0, time.UTC)
    fmt.Println(t)

    //time.Parse() Example
    //Parse YYYY-MM-DD
    t, _ = time.Parse("2006-01-02", "2020-01-29")
    fmt.Println(t)
}

Output:

2020-02-03 11:34:10.85639 +0530 IST m=+0.000297951
2021-02-21 01:10:30 +0000 UTC
2020-01-29 00:00:00 +0000 UTC