PYTZ - Appengine

Note: As of Dec 1, 2016, AppEngine appears to natively include pytz 2016.4.

Python Timezone for Google App Engine.

There are some issues with pytz on Google App Engine, mostly performance related. The project gae-pytz addresses these performance issues but it has two issues itself:

it not been updated in some time, meaning the timezone data is out of date;
and
it requires importing pytz.gae instead of just pytz, meaning that any
existing code (e.g. icalendar) must be patched.

This project aims to resolve these issues. It automatically builds a pytz by downloading the latest version from the launchpad source and building a patched version.

Also, instead of using the memcache approach of gae-pytz, pytz-appengine will put the timezone information into the datastore with ndb. This may or may not confer a performance advantage.

Installation and usage

To install: clone the repository, then from the command line run

$ python build.py all

This downloads the latest canonical pytz packages from PyPi and augments them by adding the code necessary to run on Google App Engine.

The build process creates a directory pytz, which you can copy to your Google App Engine directory. This is the augmented pytz module, that ought to work by storing the timezone information in ndb.

I have not created a PyPi package because it doesn't make sense in this context. One will never import anything directly from this package; it is essentially just a build script in python.

Thoughts and feedback are welcome.