Isn't django now() supposed to be in the default time zone?

Question

This might be a bit of a trivial question, but can't I get django now() to be in the time zone defined in settings.TIME_ZONE?

This is what is actually happening:

>>> from django.utils import timezone
>>> timezone.now()
datetime.datetime(2012, 5, 30, 16, 30, 0, 782087, tzinfo=<UTC>)
>>> timezone.get_default_timezone()
<DstTzInfo 'Asia/Singapore' SMT+6:55:00 STD>

Answer 1

Django's source code (as displayed in the chosen answer) explains the concept of timezone.now():

1. datetime.now() yields the current time (in your active timezone!) without timezone information ("naive datetime"), whereas ...
2. timezone.now() always yields the current time in UTC (!) with timezone information.

This is irritating at first sight, yes. They could have decided to yield the current time of the active timezone, but they didn't. You can still use timezone.localtime(timezone.now()) to get what you want:

from django.utils import timezone
from datetime import datetime

timezone.get_current_timezone()
# <DstTzInfo 'Antarctica/McMurdo' LMT+11:39:00 STD>
datetime.now()
# datetime.datetime(2014, 8, 19, 20, 8, 8, 440959)
timezone.localtime(timezone.now())
# datetime.datetime(2014, 8, 19, 20, 8, 14, 889429, tzinfo=<DstTzInfo 'Antarctica/McMurdo' NZST+12:00:00 STD>)
timezone.now()
# datetime.datetime(2014, 8, 19, 8, 8, 22, 273529, tzinfo=<UTC>)
datetime.utcnow()
# datetime.datetime(2014, 8, 19, 8, 8, 29, 769312)

For newcomers and ordinary users timezone.localtime(timezone.now()) is probably the most intuitive. A local time which still retains timezone information.

EDIT: The standard library equivalent for a timezone-aware local time is datetime.now().astimezone(). astimezone applies the system local timezone by default, which allows you to correctly convert any timezone-aware datetime to your local time. To set an arbitrary timezone using timezone names you need the pytz package.

from datetime import datetime, timezone
import pytz

datetime.now()
# datetime.datetime(2022, 9, 14, 5, 26, 35, 146551)
datetime.now().astimezone()
# datetime.datetime(2022, 9, 14, 5, 26, 44, 19645, tzinfo=datetime.timezone(datetime.timedelta(seconds=7200), 'CEST'))
datetime.now(tz=timezone.utc)
# datetime.datetime(2022, 9, 14, 3, 26, 51, 203917, tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc)
datetime.now(tz=timezone.utc).astimezone()
# datetime.datetime(2022, 9, 14, 5, 26, 58, 546724, tzinfo=datetime.timezone(datetime.timedelta(seconds=7200), 'CEST'))
datetime.now(tz=pytz.timezone('Europe/Kiev'))
# datetime.datetime(2022, 9, 14, 6, 27, 38, 714633, tzinfo=<DstTzInfo 'Europe/Kiev' EEST+3:00:00 DST>)

Answer 2

Or I could just read the source:

def now():
    """
    Returns an aware or naive datetime.datetime, depending on settings.USE_TZ.
    """
    if settings.USE_TZ:
        # timeit shows that datetime.now(tz=utc) is 24% slower
        return datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc)
    else:
        return datetime.now()

Answer is nope, I have to adjust it myself.