Find the timezone & local time of your visitors using Python

In a previous post we had discussed the importance of personalization of the content of your website / mobile app based on the local time of your user. In this post, we will learn how to implement that using Python (if you need a code snippet in a different language, please contact us).

Prerequisites:

1. The ipapi.co API for fetching the timezone
2. Python 3.x
3. datetime , pytzand requests module

Step 1: Install the required modules via pip

pip install requests pytz

Step 2: Import Required Libraries

Let’s start by importing the necessary libraries.

import requests
from datetime import datetime
import pytz

Step 3: Fetch Timezone from ipapi

Assuming the user’s IP address is known or can be inferred from the API endpoint, we’ll retrieve the timezone using the API.

Get your timezone (ouptut format is text)

response = requests.get('https://ipapi.co/timezone/')
user_timezone = response.text

or get the timezone of a specific IP

ip = '8.8.8.8'
response = requests.get('https://ipapi.co/{}/timezone/'.format(ip))
user_timezone = response.text

Alternative output format (JSON)

response = requests.get('https://ipapi.co/json/')
location_data = response.json()

try:
  user_timezone = location_data['timezone']
except Exception as e:
  print(e)

Step 4: Compute Local Time

With the user’s timezone in hand, we can now calculate and display the accurate local time.

# Get the timezone object using pytz
timezone_obj = pytz.timezone(user_timezone)

# Get the current time in the user's timezone
current_time = datetime.now(timezone_obj)

# Display the time zone
print("User's timezone: {}".format(user_timezone))

>>> User's timezone: America/Los_Angeles

# Display the time zone
print("User's timezone: {}".format(user_timezone))

>>> Current local time: 2023–08–28 22:07:22 PDT

You can read more about the API at https://ipapi.co/api/