As I mentioned in my previous post, I was struggling to get the Flask login manager and the sqlalchemy ORM to work together, so once I got it working, I felt it would be a good idea to create a separate github repository with template code so that I don’t have to repeat the process again. It turns out that flask has it’s own sqlalchemy extension that abstracts away a lot of the sqlalchemy setup and integration. Unfortunately, I was not made aware of this until after I finished the template. Regardless, I got the login manager working without the flask-sqlalchemy extension, and it turns out I prefer the syntax of this method anyway, so I am sticking with it.
The github repo for the login template is here. The readme contains the installation and setup instructions for linux users. Once the flask server is up and running you should be able to view the app through a local web browser.
One of the big benefits of using the flask login manager (as opposed to dealing with authentication yourself) is that it is now very simple to require authentication to your various views in your app. Here is some example code on setting up a view that requires authentication:
@app.route("/example_page")
@login_required
def example_page():
message1 = "Hello, " + current_user.name
message2 = "Here is your example page"
return render_template("example_page.html", message1=message1, message2=message2)
Simply adding the ‘@login_rquired’ decorator is all that is required to ensure that the page can only be viewed by authenticated users. Additionally, you can access the logged in user through the global current_user object.
Some additional benefits of the flask login manager is it will handle cookie management and “remember me” functionality. It should be noted that this template is pretty bare bones. Outside of getting the flask login manager setup with a sqlalchemy database and some simple html pages, there really isn’t much else there. So there you go, let me know if you have any questions.