now - Django Template Tags

Last Updated : 12 Jul, 2025

A Django template is a text document or a Python string marked-up using the Django template language. Django being a powerful Batteries included framework provides convenience to rendering data in a template. Django templates not only allow passing data from view to template, but also provides some limited features of programming such as variables, for loops, comments, extends, now, etc. This article revolves about how to use now tag in Templates. now tag displays the current date and/or time, using a format according to the given string. Such string can contain format specifiers characters as described in the date filter section.

Syntax

{% now "D M Y H T " %}

Example

It is {% now "D d M Y" %}

Above tag will display, Tue 04 Feb 2020

now - Django template Tags Explanation

Illustration of How to use now tag in Django templates using an Example. Consider a project named geeksforgeeks having an app named geeks.

Refer to the following articles to check how to create a project and an app in Django.

How to Create a Basic Project using MVT in Django?

How to Create an App in Django ?

Now create a view through which we will access the template, In geeks/views.py,

Python3

# import Http Response from django
from django.shortcuts import render

# create a function
def geeks_view(request):

    # return response
    return render(request, "geeks.html.html")

Create a url path to map to this view. In geeks/urls.py,

Python3

from django.urls import path

# importing views from views.py
from .views import geeks_view

urlpatterns = [
    path('', geeks_view),
]

Now we will create a template to demonstrate now tag. Create a base template in geeks.html,

html

<html>
 It is the {% now "jS \o\f F" %}
</html>

Now visit http://127.0.0.1:8000/, now-Django-TEmplate-TAgs

now-Django-TEmplate-TAgs

Advanced Usage

one can also use the syntax {% now "Y" as current_year %} to store the output (as a string) inside a variable. This is useful if you want to use {% now %} inside a template tag like blocktrans for example:

{% now "Y" as current_year %}
{% blocktrans %} Copyright {{ current_year }}{% endblocktrans %}

N

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