In PlantUML we can use the special variable %date% to get the current date and time. The default format shows day of the week, date, time and timezone. We can change the date format by specifying our format with the Java SimpleDateFromat symbols. For example to only get the hours and minutes we would write %date[HH:mm]%.

In the following example we use the %date% variable as is and with a custom format:

@startuml
' Use %date% to get date diagram is generated.
title Sample with date - %date%

' We can use Java SimpleDateFormat options
' to format the date. In this example we
' only want the day-month-year of the date.
footer Generated on %date[dd-MM-yyyy]%
@enduml

When we generate a graphical representation we get the following result:

Written with PlantUML 8051.

Original blog post