Django DateTimeUTC

django-datetime-utc provides DateTimeUTCField, a naive datetime model field. In PostgreSQL this translates to the field timestamp without time zone. All timestamps are saved in UTC.

Why use this?

The problem with using Django's DateTimeField is unless the default timezone on your (PostgreSQL) database server is set to UTC it doesn't matter which TZ settings you select in Django, PostgreSQL will save all timestamps in local time with an offset.

Features

• Supports the default DateTimeField options such as auto_now_add and auto_now
• Saves all timestamps in UTC
• Values automatically converted to local time (specified by TIME_ZONE in your project settings.py) in forms and templates

Install

From PyPi:

$ pip install django-datetime-utc

In settings.py add datetimeutc to the list of installed apps, set your local time zone and ensure time zone support is enabled: :

TIME_ZONE = 'Europe/London'
USE_TZ = True
INSTALLED_APPS = (
    #...
    'datetimeutc',
)

Usage

In models.py:

from django.db import models
from datetimeutc.fields import DateTimeUTCField

class Journey(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    departure_time = DateTimeUTCField(null=True)
    arrival_time = DateTimeUTCField(null=True)
    record_created = DateTimeUTCField(auto_now_add=True)

Notes

If your code creates datetime objects, they should always be TZ aware so they are automatically converted correctly to UTC (if necessary) before being saved to the database.

Using the Journey model above as an example, to set departure_time correctly you would:

import datetime
from dateutil import tz

departure_time = datetime.datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=tz.gettz('UTC'))

# or user defined (naive) datetime objects
departure_time = user_datetime.replace(tz.gettz(settings.TIME_ZONE))

Journey.objects.create(name='Flight to LA', departure_time=departure_time)