{{date}} is a formatting helper for outputting dates in various formats. You can either pass it a date and a format string to be used to output the date like so: 
<!-- outputs something like 'July 11, 2016' -->
{{date published_at format="MMMM DD, YYYY"}}
See the Moment.js Display tokens for more options. Timezone and locale may be overridden from your site’s defaults by passing the timezone and locale parameters: 
<!-- outputs something like 'mar., 31 déc. 2013 22:58:58 +0100' -->
{{date published_at locale="fr-fr" timezone="Europe/Paris"}}
Or you can pass it a date and the timeago flag: 
<!-- outputs something like '5 mins ago' -->
{{date published_at timeago="true"}}
If you use the timeago flag on a site that uses caching - as on Ghost(Pro) - dates will be displayed relative to when the page gets cached rather than relative to the visitor’s current time. If you call {{date}} without a format, it will default to a short localised format, ll. If you call {{date}} without telling it which date to display, it will default to one of two things:
  1. If there is a published_at property available (i.e. you’re inside a post object) it will use that
  2. Otherwise, it will default to the current date
date uses moment.js for formatting dates. See their documentation for a full explanation of all the different format strings that can be used.

​
Example Code

<main role="main">
  {{#foreach posts}}
    <h2><a href="{{url}}">{{title}}</a></h2>

   <p>{{excerpt words="26"}}</p>

    {{!-- Here `published_at` is set, so this will show the article date --}}
    <time datetime="{{date format="YYYY-MM-DD"}}">{{date format="DD MMMM YYYY"}}</time>
  {{/foreach}}
</main>
<footer>
  {{!-- Here there is no `published_at` so this will show the current year --}}
  <p class="small">© {{date format="YYYY"}}</p>
</footer>