Django Timezone ¶

Overview ¶

When support for time zones is enabled, Django stores datetime information in UTC in the database, uses time-zone-aware datetime objects internally, and translates them to the end user’s time zone in templates and forms.

This is handy if your users live in more than one time zone and you want to display datetime information according to each user’s wall clock.

Even if your website is available in only one time zone , it’s still good practice to store data in UTC in your database.

The main reason is Daylight Saving Time (DST) .

Many countries have a system of DST, where clocks are moved forward in spring and backward in autumn. If you’re working in local time, you’re likely to encounter errors twice a year, when the transitions happen. (The pytz documentation discusses these issues in greater detail.)

This probably doesn’t matter for your blog, but it’s a problem if you over-bill or under-bill your customers by one hour, twice a year, every year.

The solution to this problem is to use UTC in the code and use local time only when interacting with end users.

Time zone support is disabled by default. To enable it, set USE_TZ = True in your settings file.

Time zone support uses pytz, which is installed when you install Django.

Note

The default settings.py file created by django-admin startproject includes USE_TZ = True for convenience.

Note

There is also an independent but related USE_L10N setting that controls whether Django should activate format localization.

See Format localization for more details.

If you’re wrestling with a particular problem, start with the time zone FAQ.

Example ¶

With TIME_ZONE = “America/Bogota”, we can see that we have the offset of 5 hours (05:00:00) and 4h59’59” (04:59:59).

           liste_des_transactions = LogTransactionNotariale.objects.filter(
    id_etude_notariale=agence.id_etude_notariale,
    date_transaction__range=(from_date, to_date),
)
logger.info(
    f"\n{from_date=} {to_date=}\nSQL query:\n{str(liste_des_transactions.query)}"
)

          

           container_django_transactions_colombie_dev | from_date=DateTime(2020, 3, 3, 0, 0, 0, 3025, tzinfo=Timezone('America/Bogota'))
                                             to_date=DateTime(2020, 4, 3, 23, 59, 59, 4065, tzinfo=Timezone('America/Bogota'))
container_django_transactions_colombie_dev |
SQL query
SELECT `log_transaction_notariale`.`id`, `log_transaction_notariale`.`id_etude_notariale`, `log_transaction_notariale`.`date_transaction`,
       `log_transaction_notariale`.`agence_id`, `log_transaction_notariale`.`status_transaction`, `log_transaction_notariale`.`finger1`,
       `log_transaction_notariale`.`finger2`, `log_transaction_notariale`.`match_local`, `log_transaction_notariale`.`match_rnec1`,
       `log_transaction_notariale`.`match_rnec2`, `log_transaction_notariale`.`match_biographics`,
       `log_transaction_notariale`.`global_match_rnec`, `log_transaction_notariale`.`match_rnec_enabled`,
       `log_transaction_notariale`.`match_local_enabled`
FROM `log_transaction_notariale` WHERE `log_transaction_notariale`.`date_transaction`
BETWEEN 2020-03-03T05:00:00.003025 AND 2020-04-04T04:59:59.004065
ORDER BY `log_transaction_notariale`.`date_transaction` DESC

          