10. Sessions¶

In addition to the request object there is also a second object called session which allows you to store information specific to a user from one request to the next. This is implemented on top of cookies for you and signs the cookies cryptographically. What this means is that the user could look at the contents of your cookie but not modify it, unless they know the secret key used for signing.

In order to use sessions you have to set a secret key. Here is how sessions work:

from flask import Flask, session, redirect, url_for, escape, request

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/')
def index():
    if 'username' in session:
        return 'Logged in as %s' % escape(session['username'])
    return 'You are not logged in'

@app.route('/login', methods=['GET', 'POST'])
def login():
    if request.method == 'POST':
        session['username'] = request.form['username']
        return redirect(url_for('index'))
    return '''
        <form method="post">
            <p><input type=text name=username>
            <p><input type=submit value=Login>
        </form>
    '''

@app.route('/logout')
def logout():
    # remove the username from the session if it's there
    session.pop('username', None)
    return redirect(url_for('index'))

# set the secret key.  keep this really secret:
app.secret_key = 'A0Zr98j/3yX R~XHH!jmN]LWX/,?RT'

The escape() mentioned here does escaping for you if you are not using the template engine (as in this example).

>>> import os
>>> os.urandom(24)
'\xfd{H\xe5<\x95\xf9\xe3\x96.5\xd1\x01O<!\xd5\xa2\xa0\x9fR"\xa1\xa8'

Just take that thing and copy/paste it into your code and you're done.

A note on cookie-based sessions: Flask will take the values you put into the session object and serialize them into a cookie. If you are finding some values do not persist across requests, cookies are indeed enabled, and you are not getting a clear error message, check the size of the cookie in your page responses compared to the size supported by web browsers.