EBU PromptHelper Current DateTime

Current DateTime is the pack's one no-input node: it reads the machine's clock at the moment ComfyUI executes it and returns the current date and time in four pre-formatted flavors. You'd reach for it for two very different jobs - stamping output filenames so every save is unique, and injecting "the current date" into a prompt as a piece of grounding text. It's the least glamorous node in EBU PromptHelper and also the one that's impossible to break.

How it works

It's literally datetime.now() plus formatting. No randomness, no seed, no inputs to set - every run is evaluated live, so two runs a second apart give different values, which is exactly what you want for unique filenames. The four outputs are different slices of the same instant:

• date - "February 10, 2025" style, day without a leading zero.
• time - "1:15pm" style, 12-hour with lowercase am/pm.
• datetime - "2025-02-10 1:15:33pm", the two combined.
• datetime_for_filename - "2025-02-10_13-15-33", 24-hour and colon-free so it's safe in filenames. This is the one you'll actually use.

The formats are baked in and there's no way to change them, so if you need ISO 8601 or a different style you're out of luck - this node gives you exactly these four strings and nothing else.

Where it fits

Two patterns dominate. The obvious one: feed datetime_for_filename into a filename builder or the filename field of a Save Image node so every saved PNG gets a unique, sortable timestamp - no more overwriting. The sneaky one, which the pack's own example workflow shows: use the Replace node to swap a token like MY_NOW in your prompt for the datetime output, so an LLM-style prompt can include the real current time as context ("it is currently 1:15pm"). For an encoder that reads prompts as instructions, that's a cheap way to ground a scene in the present.

Install

Ships in EBU PromptHelper - you don't install it alone. ComfyUI Manager: search "EBU PromptHelper", or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/burnsbert/ComfyUI-EBU-PromptHelper

then restart ComfyUI. No models to download and no extra dependencies (the pack is Python stdlib only).

Gotchas

Nothing to debug, but two things to know. First, the time is your local machine time - if you're generating in a different timezone than the one your viewer cares about, the stamp reflects the machine, not the world. Second, "current" means at node execution, and in a queued batch that means each image in the batch gets a slightly different stamp - usually a feature, occasionally a surprise if you expected the whole batch to share a timestamp. Neither is a failure mode; they're just the honest behavior of reading a wall clock. If you want deterministic, cached output, this node is the wrong tool by design.