systemd daemon & python getting the wrong time

Question

I made a daemon that it is started by systemd, and inside my daemon I have a python function to get the time. The problem is that the time is wrong, I have 8 hours of difference.

This is my service script:

[Unit]
Description=auto-sync daemon

[Service]
ExecStart=/bin/bash -c "/usr/bin/auto-sync -s"

[Install]
WantedBy=basic.target

I've tried multiple ways of getting the hour in python but they are all wrong.

from datetime import datetime
datetime.now().strftime("%d-%m-%Y %H:%M:%S")

I told my self that the problem could be the fact that some weird system user is running the script, so I added: User=root but I still having the same problem! Any Idea?

I actually didn't wanted to add +8 hours because I'm not sure if all the users of my program have the same problem

Answer 1

Is your timezone 8 hours off from GMT? It sounds like your python call to datetime.now() is not using your current timezone and is instead returning you the time it is in the GMT timezone.

Internally this time is just a long integer containing the number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970 GMT. Your python is running in the wrong timezone is the problem. You can use the pytz library to fix this, see these answers .