Authentication

The Authentication class provides a means of authenticating users of the site. It is designed to work out-of-the-box with a simple User model, but can be heavily customized.

The Auth system is comprised of a single class which is responsible for coordinating incoming requests to your project with known users. It provides the following:

• views for login and logout
• model to store user data (or you can provide your own)
• mechanism for identifying users across requests (uses session storage)

All of these pieces can be customized, but the default out-of-box implementation aims to provide a good starting place.

The auth system is also designed to work closely with the Admin Interface.

Getting started

In order to provide a method for users to authenticate with your site, instantiate an Auth backend for your project:

from flask import Flask

from flask_turboduck.auth import Auth
from flask_turboduck.db import Database

app = Flask(__name__)
db = Database(app)

# needed for authentication
auth = Auth(app, db)

Note

user is reserverd keyword in Postgres. Pass db_table to Auth to override db table.

Marking areas of the site as login required

If you want to mark specific areas of your site as requiring auth, you can decorate views using the Auth.login_required() decorator:

@app.route('/private/')
@auth.login_required
def private_timeline():
    user = auth.get_logged_in_user()

    # ... display the private timeline for the logged-in user

If the request comes from someone who has not logged-in with the site, they are redirected to the Auth.login() view, which allows the user to authenticate. After successfully logging-in, they will be redirected to the page they requested initially.

Retrieving the current user

Whenever in a request context, the currently logged-in user is available by calling Auth.get_logged_in_user(), which will return None if the requesting user is not logged in.

The auth system also registers a pre-request hook that stores the currently logged-in user in the special flask variable g.

Accessing the user in the templates

The auth system registers a template context processor which makes the logged-in user available in any template:

{% if user %}
  <p>Hello {{ user.username }}</p>
{% else %}
  <p>Please <a href="{{ url_for('auth.login') }}?next={{ request.path }}">log in</a></p>
{% endif %}

Using a custom “User” model

It is easy to use your own model for the User, though depending on the amount of changes it may be necessary to override methods in both the Auth and Admin classes.

Unless you want to override the default behavior of the Auth class’ mechanism for actually authenticating users (which you may want to do if relying on a 3rd-party for auth) – you will want to be sure your User model implements two methods:

• set_password(password) – takes a raw password and stores an encrypted version on model
• check_password(password) – returns whether or not the supplied password matches the one stored on the model instance

Note

The BaseUser mixin provides default implementations of these two methods.

Here’s a simple example of extending the auth system to use a custom user model:

from flask_turboduck.auth import BaseUser # <-- implements set_password and check_password

app = Flask(__name__)
db = Database(app)

# create our custom user model. note that we're mixing in BaseUser in order to
# use the default auth methods it implements, "set_password" and "check_password"
class User(db.Model, BaseUser):
    username = CharField()
    password = CharField()
    email = CharField()

    # ... our custom fields ...
    is_superuser = BooleanField()


# create a modeladmin for it
class UserAdmin(ModelAdmin):
    columns = ('username', 'email', 'is_superuser',)

    # Make sure the user's password is hashed, after it's been changed in
    # the admin interface. If we don't do this, the password will be saved
    # in clear text inside the database and login will be impossible.
    def save_model(self, instance, form, adding=False):
        orig_password = instance.password

        user = super(UserAdmin, self).save_model(instance, form, adding)

        if orig_password != form.password.data:
            user.set_password(form.password.data)
            user.save()

        return user


# subclass Auth so we can return our custom classes
class CustomAuth(Auth):
    def get_user_model(self):
        return User

    def get_model_admin(self):
        return UserAdmin

# instantiate the auth
auth = CustomAuth(app, db)

Here’s how you might integrate the custom auth with the admin area of your site:

# subclass Admin to check for whether the user is a superuser
class CustomAdmin(Admin):
    def check_user_permission(self, user):
        return user.is_superuser

# instantiate the admin
admin = CustomAdmin(app, auth)

admin.register(User, UserAdmin)
admin.setup()