How to get system timezone setting and pass it to pytz.timezone?

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tzlocal module returns pytz tzinfo’s object corresponding to the local timezone:

import time
from datetime import datetime

import pytz # $ pip install pytz
from tzlocal import get_localzone # $ pip install tzlocal

# get local timezone    
local_tz = get_localzone() 

# test it
# utc_now, now = datetime.utcnow(), datetime.now()
ts = time.time()
utc_now, now = datetime.utcfromtimestamp(ts), datetime.fromtimestamp(ts)

local_now = utc_now.replace(tzinfo=pytz.utc).astimezone(local_tz) # utc -> local
assert local_now.replace(tzinfo=None) == now

It works even during daylight savings time transitions when local time may be ambiguous.

local_tz also works for past dates even if utc offset for the local timezone was different at the time. dateutil.tz.tzlocal()-based solution fails in this case e.g., in Europe/Moscow timezone (example from 2013):

>>> import os, time
>>> os.environ['TZ'] = 'Europe/Moscow'
>>> time.tzset()
>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> from dateutil.tz import tzlocal
>>> from tzlocal import get_localzone
>>> dateutil_tz = tzlocal()
>>> tzlocal_tz = get_localzone()
>>> datetime.fromtimestamp(0, dateutil_tz)                              
datetime.datetime(1970, 1, 1, 4, 0, tzinfo=tzlocal())
>>> datetime.fromtimestamp(0, tzlocal_tz)
datetime.datetime(1970, 1, 1, 3, 0, tzinfo=<DstTzInfo 'Europe/Moscow' MSK+3:00:00 STD>)

dateutil returns wrong UTC+4 offset instead of the correct UTC+3 on 1970-01-01.

For those bumping into this in 2017 dateutil.tz.tzlocal() is still broken. The above example works now because the current utf offset is UTC+3 in Moscow (that by accident is equal to the utc offset from 1970). To demonstrate the error we can choose a date when utc offset is UTC+4:

>>> import os, time
>>> os.environ['TZ'] = 'Europe/Moscow'
>>> time.tzset()
>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> from dateutil.tz import tzlocal
>>> from tzlocal import get_localzone
>>> dateutil_tz = tzlocal()
>>> tzlocal_tz = get_localzone()
>>> ts = datetime(2014, 6,1).timestamp() # get date in 2014 when gmtoff=14400 in Moscow
>>> datetime.fromtimestamp(ts, dateutil_tz)
datetime.datetime(2014, 5, 31, 23, 0, tzinfo=tzlocal())
>>> datetime.fromtimestamp(ts, tzlocal_tz)
datetime.datetime(2014, 6, 1, 0, 0, tzinfo=<DstTzInfo 'Europe/Moscow' MSK+4:00:00 STD>)

dateutil returns wrong UTC+3 offset instead of the correct UTC+4 on 2014-06-01.

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