Hacktoberfest 2026: the issues maintainers tagged for October, open and beginner-friendly. Browse Hacktoberfest issues

Use UTC for `timestamp without time zone`

Open
#1,176 2 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
38/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
postgresql, python
Domain
databases

Research direction

Start by locating asyncpg's PostgreSQL timestamp conversion entry point and the tests covering timestamp without time zone values. Review the current naive-datetime behavior and its compatibility implications; done should be a documented, tested decision about whether these values receive UTC tzinfo.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

asyncpg converts timestamps to datetime.datetime. If a column has type timestamp without time zone then the datetime object's .tzinfo is None. This means datetime implicitly treats this datetime as if it is local, and source code has to replace tzinfo for every column that has timestamp without time zone.

I'd expect that when developers specify no timezone it is intended to be UTC, otherwise timezone would be specified in the postgres datatype?

With this in mind it makes sense to provide UTC timezone type when creating datetime.datetime objects from columns that do not specify timezone (at least IMO).

Dominant language
Python
Stars
8.1k
Forks
469
Avg merge
2d 20h
Merged PRs (30d)
9

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from MagicStack/asyncpg

All issues in MagicStack/asyncpg

Similar issues

More Python issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.