How do I get a value of datetime.today() in Python that is "timezone aware"?

I am trying to subtract one date value from the value of datetime.datetime.today() to calculate how long ago something was. But it complains:

TypeError: can't subtract offset-naive and offset-aware datetimes

The value datetime.datetime.today() doesn't seem to be "timezone aware", while my other date value is. How do I get a value of datetime.datetime.today() that is timezone aware?

Right now, it's giving me the time in local time, which happens to be PST, i.e. UTC - 8 hours. Worst case, is there a way I can manually enter a timezone value into the datetime object returned by datetime.datetime.today() and set it to UTC-8?

Of course, the ideal solution would be for it to automatically know the timezone.

Solution 1:

In the standard library, there is no cross-platform way to create aware timezones without creating your own timezone class. (Edit: Python 3.9 introduces zoneinfo in the standard library which does provide this functionality.)

On Windows, there's win32timezone.utcnow(), but that's part of pywin32. I would rather suggest to use the pytz library, which has a constantly updated database of most timezones.

Working with local timezones can be very tricky (see "Further reading" links below), so you may rather want to use UTC throughout your application, especially for arithmetic operations like calculating the difference between two time points.

You can get the current date/time like so:

import pytz
from datetime import datetime
datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=pytz.utc)

Mind that datetime.today() and datetime.now() return the local time, not the UTC time, so applying .replace(tzinfo=pytz.utc) to them would not be correct.

Another nice way to do it is:

datetime.now(pytz.utc)

which is a bit shorter and does the same.

Further reading/watching why to prefer UTC in many cases:

• pytz documentation
• What Every Developer Should Know About Time – development hints for many real-life use cases
• The Problem with Time & Timezones - Computerphile – funny, eye-opening explanation about the complexity of working with timezones (video)

Solution 2:

Get the current time, in a specific timezone:

import datetime
import pytz
my_date = datetime.datetime.now(pytz.timezone('US/Pacific'))

Remember to install pytz first.

Solution 3:

In Python 3.2+: datetime.timezone.utc:

The standard library makes it much easier to specify UTC as the time zone:

>>> import datetime
>>> datetime.datetime.now(datetime.timezone.utc)
datetime.datetime(2020, 11, 27, 14, 34, 34, 74823, tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc)

You can also get a datetime that includes the local time offset using astimezone:

>>> datetime.datetime.now(datetime.timezone.utc).astimezone()
datetime.datetime(2020, 11, 27, 15, 34, 34, 74823, tzinfo=datetime.timezone(datetime.timedelta(seconds=3600), 'CET'))

(In Python 3.6+, you can shorten the last line to: datetime.datetime.now().astimezone())

If you want a solution that uses only the standard library and that works in both Python 2 and Python 3, see jfs' answer.

In Python 3.9+: zoneinfo to use the IANA time zone database:

In Python 3.9, you can specify particular time zones using the standard library, using zoneinfo, like this:

>>> from zoneinfo import ZoneInfo
>>> datetime.datetime.now(ZoneInfo("America/Los_Angeles"))
datetime.datetime(2020, 11, 27, 6, 34, 34, 74823, tzinfo=zoneinfo.ZoneInfo(key='America/Los_Angeles'))

zoneinfo gets its database of time zones from the operating system, or from the first-party PyPI package tzdata if available.

Solution 4:

A one-liner using only the standard library works starting with Python 3.3. You can get a local timezone aware datetime object using astimezone (as suggested by johnchen902):

from datetime import datetime, timezone

aware_local_now = datetime.now(timezone.utc).astimezone()

print(aware_local_now)
# 2020-03-03 09:51:38.570162+01:00

print(repr(aware_local_now))
# datetime.datetime(2020, 3, 3, 9, 51, 38, 570162, tzinfo=datetime.timezone(datetime.timedelta(0, 3600), 'CET'))

Solution 5:

Here's a stdlib solution that works on both Python 2 and 3:

from datetime import datetime

now = datetime.now(utc) # Timezone-aware datetime.utcnow()
today = datetime(now.year, now.month, now.day, tzinfo=utc) # Midnight

where today is an aware datetime instance representing the beginning of the day (midnight) in UTC and utc is a tzinfo object (example from the documentation):

from datetime import tzinfo, timedelta

ZERO = timedelta(0)

class UTC(tzinfo):
    def utcoffset(self, dt):
        return ZERO

    def tzname(self, dt):
        return "UTC"

    def dst(self, dt):
        return ZERO

utc = UTC()

Related: performance comparison of several ways to get midnight (start of a day) for a given UTC time. Note: it is more complex, to get midnight for a time zone with a non-fixed UTC offset.