django 1.4 timezone.now() vs datetime.datetime.now()

Question

I\'m a bit confused by the daylight savings handling

settings.py:

TIME_ZONE = \'Europe/London\'
USE_TZ = True

in the django shell:<

Answer 1

According to timezone.now() source:

def now():
    """
    Returns an aware or naive datetime.datetime, depending on settings.USE_TZ.
    """
    if settings.USE_TZ:
        # timeit shows that datetime.now(tz=utc) is 24% slower
        return datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc)
    else:
        return datetime.now()

It's based on utc instead of your default timezone. You could achieve same value by using

now = timezone.make_aware(datetime.datetime.now(),timezone.get_default_timezone())
print now.astimezone(timezone.utc)