Sessions: Managing user state in Flask

In today’s digital landscape, captivating user engagement and providing tailored experiences is paramount for the success of any tech tool or application. Imagine seamlessly remembering user preferences, and maintaining shopping carts across visits. How do your favorite applications and sites do it?

Enter Sessions — let us uncover its inner workings, and equip you with the knowledge to transform the way you approach user state management. Sessions enable you to maintain user-specific data across multiple requests and Flask provides a simple solution for handling sessions.

Sessions allow web applications to store and retrieve user-specific information, such as login credentials, preferences, and shopping cart contents, across multiple HTTP requests. In utilizing sessions, we can create personalized experiences for users and maintain continuity throughout their interactions with the application.

A session is encrypted information that is stored on the web server in a temporary directory. Encrypting data is a secure method employed to store information, particularly when the data should remain untouched or hidden from the user’s view.

Enable Sessions in Flask:

Flask provides a built-in session management system that relies on signed cookies to store and retrieve session data securely. To illustrate how we can use sessions let us experiment with a simple example.

from flask import Flask, session
import secrets

app = Flask(__name__)
app.secret_key = 'my_hard_to_crack_secret_key'
# below is how i run mine
# app.secret_key = secrets.token_hex(16)

In the above code, we import the session from the flask module first. The app.secret_key is used to sign the session cookie, to add an extra layer of security that’s why we can’t run sessions without it. Personally, for extra security, I use ‘secrets’ to help me with that.