Get local system time in Django

Question

I have a Django app that interacts heavily with other legacy databases. These other databases all use local time, not UTC. I understand Django's time zone support as well as the recommendation to always use UTC time except with interacting with a user. In this case, I really just need Django to give me the system date/time.

In settings.py I have

USE_TZ = False

And when I run date from the linux command line I get (for example):

Tue Mar 15 17:03:42 MDT 2016

Also when I open a regular (non-django) python shell and run

import datetime
str(datetime.datetime.now())

I get

'2016-03-15 17:04:55.182283'

But when I run the same commands from a Django shell (python manage.py shell) I get a time one hour earlier:

'2016-03-15 16:07:10.949269'

Is there some way that I can get a datetime object that has exactly the system time, ignoring any other time zone magic?

Answer 1

You'd want to use django.utils.timezone , specifically:

from django.utils.timezone import localtime, now

# get now datetime based upon django settings.py TZ_INFO
localtime(now())

Answer 2

From django docs :

How do I interact with a database that stores datetimes in local time?

Set the TIME_ZONE option to the appropriate time zone for this database in the DATABASES setting.

This is useful for connecting to a database that doesn't support time zones and that isn't managed by Django when USE_TZ is True.

Set USE_TZ=True so that django would use a timezone-aware datetime objects internally.

Set TIME_ZONE in the DATABASES setting, to accommodate the legacy databases. Django will convert your datetimes to the appropriate timezone automatically ie, to get the current time it is enough:

from django.utils import timezone

now = timezone.now()

Note: datetime.now() returns a naive datetime object. Don't use it.