Both Django’s DateTimeField and DateField have two very useful arguments for automatically managing date and time. If you want keep track on when a specific instance was created or updated you don’t need to do it manually: just set the auto_now and auto_now_add arguments to True like in the following example:

class Invoice(models.Model):
    description = models.CharField(max_length=255)
    status = models.CharField(max_length=10)
    vendor = models.ForeignKey(Vendor)
    created_at = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
    updated_at = models.DateTimeField(auto_now=True)

The auto_now_add will set the timezone.now() only when the instance is created, and auto_now will update the field everytime the save method is called.

It is important to note that both arguments will trigger the field update event with timezone.now(), meaning when you create an object, both created_at and updated_at will be filled.

This is a very simple trick that will make your codebase cleaner.