Get timezone aware datetime

Question

How would I do the following to get a UTC datetime object, so django doesn't complain about /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/django/db/models/fields/__init__.py:808: RuntimeWarning: DateTimeField received a naive datetime (2015-02-11 00:00:00) while time zone support is active. ?

>>> from django.utils import timezone
>>> timezone.date(2014,1,1)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<console>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'date'

Answer 1

Taking your example, you should use datetime and specify the tzinfo argument:

timezone.datetime(2014, 1, 1, tzinfo=timezone.UTC())

You may also be interested in Django's make_aware function:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/utils/#django.utils.timezone.make_aware

Answer 2

Assuming your input is a string with no timezone information, just append a literal "Z" to your string. This indicates zero offset from UTC time.