How to set different Time zones in Django

django, django-forms, python

Solution

There's very nice Django documentation regarding timezones. You'll need to determine exactly what you mean when you say you'd like a different time zone per subdomain. Normally, the Django `TIME_ZONE` setting is used to specify a default time zone. In your case however, you effectively want a different default `TIME_ZONE` setting depending on which subdomain is being accessed.

Probably the most robust way to achieve this goal is:

- Always store dates in your UTC, independent of the time zone allocated to a sub domain.

- Write some custom Django Middleware which will set the default time zone to use when each request arrives. The Django documentation linked above gives an example. Here's an example:

import django.utils.timezone
from pytz import timezone

class TimezoneMiddleware(object):
    def process_request(self, request):
        # Put logic here to choose timezone based on domain.
        if request.META['HTTP_HOST'] == 'hotel1.subdomain.com':
            tz = timezone('US/Eastern')
        else:
            tz = timezone('UTC')

        if tz:
            django.utils.timezone.activate(tz)
        else:
            django.utils.timezone.deactivate()

Now, when Django handles date entered or displayed, it will use the timezone selected by middleware. This doesn't solve the problem of having users in a different time zone to the subdomain for which the time zone is set. Normally, this problem would be solved by having each Django user store their preferred time zone, and the middleware would choose the time zone based on their session data as described in the documentation.

Problem

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