Question

In django – is there a default timestamp field for all objects? That is, do I have to explicitly declare a ‘timestamp’ field for ‘created on’ in my Model – or is there a way to get this automagically?

Answer 1

No such thing by default, but adding one is super-easy. Just use the auto_now_add parameter in the DateTimeField class:

created = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)

You can also use auto_now for an ‘updated on’ field.
Check the behavior of auto_now here.

For auto_now_add here.

A model with both fields will look like this:

class MyModel(models.Model):
    created_at = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
    updated_at = models.DateTimeField(auto_now=True)