In the standard library, there is no cross-platform way to create aware timezones without creating your own timezone class.

On Windows, there's win32timezone.utcnow(), but that's part of pywin32. I would rather suggest to use the pytz library, which has a constantly updated database of most timezones.

Working with local timezones can be very tricky (see "Further reading" links below), so you may rather want to use UTC throughout your application, especially for arithmetic operations like calculating the difference between two time points.

You can get the current date/time like so:

import pytzfrom datetime import datetimedatetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=pytz.utc)

Mind that datetime.today() and datetime.now() return the local time, not the UTC time, so applying .replace(tzinfo=pytz.utc) to them would not be correct.

Another nice way to do it is:

datetime.now(pytz.utc)

which is a bit shorter and does the same.

Further reading/watching why to prefer UTC in many cases:

• pytz documentation
• What Every Developer Should Know About Time – development hints for many real-life use cases
• The Problem with Time & Timezones - Computerphile – funny, eye-opening explanation about the complexity of working with timezones (video)

Get the current time, in a specific timezone:

import datetimeimport pytzmy_date = datetime.datetime.now(pytz.timezone('US/Pacific'))

Remember to install pytz first.

In Python 3.2+: datetime.timezone.utc:

The standard library makes it much easier to specify UTC as the time zone:

>>> import datetime>>> datetime.datetime.now(datetime.timezone.utc)datetime.datetime(2020, 11, 27, 14, 34, 34, 74823, tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc)

You can also get a datetime that includes the local time offset using astimezone:

>>> datetime.datetime.now(datetime.timezone.utc).astimezone()datetime.datetime(2020, 11, 27, 15, 34, 34, 74823, tzinfo=datetime.timezone(datetime.timedelta(seconds=3600), 'CET'))

(In Python 3.6+, you can shorten the last line to: datetime.datetime.now().astimezone())

If you want a solution that uses only the standard library and that works in both Python 2 and Python 3, see jfs' answer.

In Python 3.9+: zoneinfo to use the IANA time zone database:

In Python 3.9, you can specify particular time zones using the standard library, using zoneinfo, like this:

>>> from zoneinfo import ZoneInfo>>> datetime.datetime.now(ZoneInfo("America/Los_Angeles"))datetime.datetime(2020, 11, 27, 6, 34, 34, 74823, tzinfo=zoneinfo.ZoneInfo(key='America/Los_Angeles'))

zoneinfo gets its database of time zones from the operating system, or from the first-party PyPI package tzdata if available.