How do I add future dates to table? - ruby-on-rails

Question

I'm building a schedule in rails and I need to see if today's date matches the date of an event in the future. I have an event model with a date field and I know the dates of all the future events, but how do I add those dates to the table in a way rails will understand?
I'd like to do something like:
if Time.now is equal to next event
# do this
Time.now outputs
2014-03-18 11:05:14 -0500
How do I add that sort of format to the dates in the table so that I can compare Time.now to the date of the future event?
EDIT
Say I'm creating a new Event in the rails console, And I want the date of the Event to be April 1, 2014. I'm trying to figure out what syntax I need to enter the date in the console. For example, to create an Event in console I would do something like
Event.create(name: "Event1", date: ??)
What do I put in place of the question marks for the date of April 1, 2014 in syntax understood by the computer? I need April 1, 2014 in a datetime format, not a string.
Thank you!

Answer 1

seeds.rb is—as the file extension implies—just Ruby.
You can supply the date in any form that an available Ruby library can parse into a Time or Date object.
If you want to keep it human-readable, you can use Date.parse:
Event.create(name: 'Event1', date: Date.parse('Apr 1 2014'))
Event.create(name: 'Event2', date: Date.parse('April 1, 2014'))
Event.create(name: 'Event3', date: Date.parse('1-Apr-14'))
Or, if you need human-readable times as well, Time.parse:
Event.create(name: 'Event4', date: Time.parse('09:15 1 Apr 2014'))
Event.create(name: 'Event5', date: Time.parse('April 1, 2014, 9:15am'))
Event.create(name: 'Event6', date: Time.parse('1-Apr-14, 09:15 -0700'))
If you prefer to use UNIX timestamps, Time.at creates a new Time object from them (and offers a mild performance benefit over parsing textual dates):
Event.create(name: 'Event7', date: Time.at(1395166977))

Answer 2

If you have defined next_event as a datetime column in database, rails will automatically initialize it as a date_time object when you load it from database. All you need is this
if Time.now.to_date == next_event.to_date
For adding the future days, you can use days.from_now method
For eg
1.days.from_now #Wed, 19 Mar 2014 16:29:26 UTC +00:00
2.days_from_now #Thu, 20 Mar 2014 16:30:16 UTC +00:00
Or you can use normal addition
Time.now + 2.days
Time.now + 2.hours
Time.now + 10.minutes
Event.create(name: "Event1", date: (Time.now + 1.day))