I want to store time as unix timestamp in my MYSQL database, I have django project with model:
date = models.DateField()
But I didn't find any models.Timestamp()
or anything similiar. Is there a way to create timestamp column for MYSQL Db in Django? I found some articles here on stack but they are 5+ years old so there might a be a better solution now.
In Django, one usually uses a DateTimeField [Django-doc] for that. It is a column that thus stores a combination of date and time.
One can let Django automatically intialize (or update) the timestamp if the record is constructed or updated with auto_now_add=True [Django-doc] to initialize it when the record was created, and auto_now=True [Django-doc] to update. So it is a common pattern to see a (base)model like:
class TimestampModel(models.Model):
created = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
updated = models.DateTimeField(auto_now=True)
class Meta:
abstract = Truesuch that subclasses of the TimestampModel thus have two extra columns created and updated that store the time when the object was created and last updated respectively.
A datetime column has a larger range, as is specified in the MySQL documentation:
The
DATETIMEtype is used for values that contain both date and time parts. MySQL retrieves and displaysDATETIMEvalues in'YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss'format. The supported range is'1000-01-01 00:00:00'to'9999-12-31 23:59:59'.The
TIMESTAMPdata type is used for values that contain both date and time parts.TIMESTAMPhas a range of'1970-01-01 00:00:01' UTCto'2038-01-19 03:14:07' UTC.
DateTimeFieldis used, a timestamp can represent only a subset of the datetime values.