why connection.timezone is None for postgres db connection in django?

Question

I am exploring django with postgres. I have encountered a strange thing. TIMEZONE setting for my postgres connection(I am not talking about TIME_ZONE in settings.py) is surprisingly set to None. I have set timezone to 'Asia/Kolkata' and USE_TZ is also True. As per django docs, when USE_TZ is True, the connection timezone 'UTC' by default, while it'll be equal to the value of TIME_ZONE in settings.py, when USE_TZ is False. But, for me in both the cases, the value of connection.timezone is empty.

I have tried with sqlite3 backend, where I am getting expected results. I don't know, why I am not getting expected behaviour with postgres.

I am using django==1.10.5 and postgres is 9.5 on 64 bit machine. I am using following command to get connection's timezone.

from django.db import connection
print (connection.timezone)

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

django.db.connection is a common abstraction that wraps the database-specific connection.

You can access the underlying database connection with connection.connection .

In the case of PostgreSQL that will be a psycopg2 connection. The documented way to get the connection timezone with psycopg2 is get_parameter_status("TimeZone") .

Putting it all together, this should work:

connection.connection.get_parameter_status("TimeZone")

But wait! Database connections are created lazily, so that will only work if you've already performed some kind of database operation. To be sure you have a connection you can call connection.ensure_connection() , or, if you want a single expression:

>>> from django.db import connection
>>> connection.cursor().connection.get_parameter_status("TimeZone")
'UTC'

For reference, see the ensure_timezone() method of the PostgreSQL database wrapper.