To sort an array by a Date value in JavaScript or TypeScript, we will use the Array.prototype.sort() method to perform the sorting and we will take the date value of each object and first convert it to a Unix Epoch timestamp (in milliseconds) so we can directly compare the two timestamp numbers.

interface User {
  name: string
  joined: Date
}

const users: User[] = [
  { name: "Lucy", joined: new Date("2020-11-21") },
  { name: "Pedro", joined: new Date("2020-09-01" },
  { name: "Bella", joined: new Date("2020-01-27") },
  { name: "Jake", joined: new Date("2020-07-18") },
];

function dateToUnixEpoch(date: Date): number {
	return Math.floor(date.getTime()) / 1000;
}

Get most recent user signups first (descending order):

const descending = [...users].sort(
	(a, b) => b.joined.getTime() - a.joined.getTime()
);

Get oldest user signups first (ascending order):

const ascending = [...users].sort(
	(a, b) => a.joined.getTime() - b.joined.getTime()
);

Notes

Note here we are using Array Destructuring to create a new copy of the array when we’re doing the sort. The reason for this is that sort mutates (or changes in-place) our original array as well as returning a new array, which might not be what we want. If you don’t care if it mutates your original array, you can just pass the variable directly like users.sort(...).

Also note that we don’t technically have to call .getTime() method as JavaScript will do this for us when performing a mathematical operation on the two dates, but it is considered best practice (and will prevent TypeScript from complaining) to explicitly do the conversion before doing the comparison.

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