Question

I had to make a launcher script for my django app, and it seems it somehow switches the timezone to GMT (default being +2), and every datetime is two hours behind when using the script. What could be causing that?

Here is the launcher script that I use:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import os
import subprocess
import shlex
import time

cwd = os.getcwd()

p1 = subprocess.Popen(shlex.split("python manage.py runserver"),
        cwd=os.path.join(cwd, "drugsworld"))
p2 = subprocess.Popen(shlex.split("python coffee_auto_compiler.py"),
        cwd=os.path.join(cwd))

try:
    while True:
        time.sleep(2)
except KeyboardInterrupt:
    p1.terminate()
    p2.terminate()

If I manually run python manage.py runserver, the timezone is +2. If, however, I use this script, the timezone is set to GMT.

Answer 1

Hmm. Python respects the TZ environment variable… you’re not changing it in your script, so it should be equivalent to running it at the shell.

I often set the time zone explicitly. In Django specifically, you can set this in the settings.py file (TIME_ZONE). More general python is:

os.environ['TZ']="America/New_York"
time.tzset()

I imagine if you set the timezone in your settings file, the problem will go away.