Django displays tow different timezones for the same model attribute when viewing in admin site vs a query for the model in a script

Question

How to make consistant timezone across Django. In my settings.py I have TIME_ZONE = 'America/New_York' and USE_TZ = True. I have a model

def MyModel(models.Model):
    date_time = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)

if I view a field from that model (say pk=1) it correctly displays value for an eastern timezone. From my terminal, when I run python manage.py shell and make a query for that same field (pk=1), it will print the date_time attribute of that field in UTC format as follows: datetime.datetime(2020, 10, 22, 0, 19, 28, 696739, tzinfo=<UTC>)

Why is this happening? And how can I make it so that all queries use the correct timezone when filtering by date?

Answer 1

Django template level automatically converts the UTC to your local time. But during in model level, they are treated in UTC.

You can use the builtin timezone utils localtime to convert to your desired output.