By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: June 4, 2016
Here's a quick example of how to default a MySQL timestamp field to "now", i.e., the current date and time. The following MySQL table definition shows a field named date_created
that uses the now
function to record the timestamp for when the row was created:
create table users ( id int unsigned auto_increment not null, username varchar(32) not null, password varchar(32) not null, date_created timestamp default now() ) ENGINE=InnoDB;
Just to highlight it, the "MySQL timestamp default to now" field is this one:
date_created timestamp default now()
If you do a SQL insert into this table like this (skipping over the date_created field):
INSERT INTO users (username,password) VALUES ('FOO','BAR');
the date_created
timestamp field will default to the time the record was inserted into the MySQL table.