[Django]-Django – timestamp fields in model

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You don’t need to use a datetime object to feed to DateTimeField. You can use the auto_now_add=… parameter [Django-doc] or auto_now=… parameter [Django-doc] to store the timestamp of the creation or update respectively. In the past, there were some problems with that, but to the best of my knowledge, these issues have been fixed.

For example:

class MyModel(models.Model):
    created = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
    updated = models.DateTimeField(auto_now=True)

Or you can specify an abstract base class, and inherit in all models that need timestamps:

class TimestampedModel(models.Model):
    created = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
    updated = models.DateTimeField(auto_now=True)

    class Meta:
        abstract = True

class MyModel(TimestampedModel):
    # …
    pass

For a datetime object, you can include the timezone with tzinfo. For example you can set the timezone to UTC with:

from dateutil.tz import UTC

mynewdatetime = mydatetime.replace(tzinfo=UTC)
👤willeM_ Van Onsem

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