5. Sessions¶

If you have the Flask.secret_key set you can use sessions in Flask applications. A session basically makes it possible to remember information from one request to another. The way Flask does this is by using a signed cookie. So the user can look at the session contents, but not modify it unless they know the secret key, so make sure to set that to something complex and unguessable.

To access the current session you can use the session object:

class flask.session¶

The session object works pretty much like an ordinary dict, with the difference that it keeps track on modifications.

This is a proxy. See Notes On Proxies for more information.

The following attributes are interesting:

new¶

True if the session is new, False otherwise.

modified¶

True if the session object detected a modification. Be advised that modifications on mutable structures are not picked up automatically, in that situation you have to explicitly set the attribute to True yourself. Here an example:

# this change is not picked up because a mutable object (here
# a list) is changed.
session['objects'].append(42)
# so mark it as modified yourself
session.modified = True

permanent¶

If set to True the session lives for permanent_session_lifetime seconds. The default is 31 days. If set to False (which is the default) the session will be deleted when the user closes the browser.