django's timezone.now does not show the right time

imkost picture imkost · Apr 16, 2013 · Viewed 35.8k times · Source

My server is located in London.

In my settings.py I have:

TIME_ZONE = 'Europe/Moscow'
USE_TZ = True

But when I execute this:

from django.utils import timezone

print timezone.now().hour

the code prints London's time. What am I doing wrong?

UPDATE:

>> timezone.now()
datetime.datetime(2013, 4, 16, 12, 28, 52, 797923, tzinfo=<UTC>)

Interesting... tzinfo = <UTC>. So maybe it prints not a London time, but UTC's +0 time? Anyway, is there any way to make Django show Moscow time?

Also when I render template with now = timezone.now()

{{ now.hour }} prints 12 (London time)

{{ now|date:"G" }} prints 16 (Moscow time)

Answer

Daniel Hepper picture Daniel Hepper · Apr 16, 2013

See question #2 in the "Usage" section of the Django docs.

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

Since the doc above also talks about a best practice, including an excerpt below:

How can I obtain the local time in the current time zone?

Well, the first question is, do you really need to?

You should only use local time when you’re interacting with humans, and the template layer provides filters and tags to convert datetimes to the time zone of your choice.

Furthermore, Python knows how to compare aware datetimes, taking into account UTC offsets when necessary. It’s much easier (and possibly faster) to write all your model and view code in UTC. So, in most circumstances, the datetime in UTC returned by django.utils.timezone.now() will be sufficient.