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

Since Django 1.11 you can simply call django.utils.timezone.localtime to fetch datetime for your default timezone.

>>> from django.utils import timezone
>>> timezone.localtime()

From docs:

Converts an aware datetime to a different time zone, by default the current time zone.

When value is omitted, it defaults to now().

This function doesn’t work on naive datetimes; use make_aware() instead.

Answer 2

from datetime import datetime
from django.utils import timezone

def now():
    try:
        return timezone.localtime(timezone.now()).strftime('%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S')

    except Exception as exp:
        print('TimeZone is not set - {}'.format(exp))
        return datetime.now().strftime('%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S')

If you set TIME_ZONE = 'Europe/London' and USE_TZ = True in Django setting, you will place in the try section and else, in the except section.

---

[NOTE]:

• .strftime() is an option

Answer 3

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)

Answer 4

You can pass a param to datetime.datetime.now():

import pytz, datetime
utc = pytz.utc
utc_now = datetime.datetime.now(tz=utc)

Or use timezone, a la:

from django.utils import timezone

now = timezone.now()

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.1/topics/i18n/timezones/