python - Get local timezone in django

Question

I have a mysql DATETIME value that is stored in system time, UTC. I need to convert that to my local timezone in django. Here is what I currently have:

# value in mysql
`timestamp`
2013-02-01 22:48:45

# settings.py
TIME_ZONE = 'America/Los_Angeles'

# views.py
last_updated = PathLastUpdated.objects.all()[0].timestamp
print last_updated
2013-02-01 22:48:45 <-- same as UTC

How would I get the last_updated value to be in my local timezone = "America/Los Angeles" ?

Answer 1

The Django documentation for timezones documents all the necessary details for converting datetime objects to the appropriate time zone for display.

Your data is stored in UTC which is good. When you obtain a DateTime field object from the database it will be a naive datetime.datetime object. ie A date/time without a timezone attached. It's then up to you to do the conversion.

User of your webapp may be in different time zones so the conversion to an appropriate time zone must occur for each request. This is why there is an activate function to set the current time zone.

If you have pytz installed you should be able to do the following:

from django.utils.timezone import activate
activate(settings.TIME_ZONE)

All output of date field in the template engine will then automatically convert you naive date time objects to the correct time zone for display.

If you just have a single naive datetime.datetime instance that you want to set the time zone on, then just use the pytz module directly. It is not normal to do this in your views though, as it's a good idea to only convert the time zone at the point of presentation.

from pytz import timezone

settings_time_zone = timezone(settings.TIME_ZONE)
last_updated = last_updated.astimezone(settings_time_zone)