This time around, we are going to be coding our own timestamp microservice using Node.js, and then, deploy it to Heroku. It’s going to be a very simple service that will return the unix time and natural date for the received input. Our API should be able to receive and properly handle the following two formats:

• A unix timestamp is a metric used to track time by displaying the miliseconds (sometimes seconds) that have passed since January 1st, 1970 at 00:00:00 UTC. For a quick test, you can get the unix timestamp for right now, by going into the Chrome DevTools console and typing the following: Date.now();
• The natural language date means that the date is passed in the following format: October 1, 2016.

Our timestamp microservice will accept any one of these two formats, and then, return a JSON object containing both formats. In other words:

• If the API receives this: 1477388794872, it will output the following JSON object:

  {
    "unix": 1477388794872,
    "natural": "October 25, 2016"
  }

• Receiving “October 25, 2016” will output the same exact JSON object.

If no unix timestamp nor natural date is present, we’ll return null for both fields:

{
  "unix": null,
  "natural": null
}