How to use g.user global in flask

Question

As I understand the g variable in Flask, it should provide me with a global place to stash data like holding the current user after login. Is this correct?

I would

Answer 1

g is a thread local and is per-request (See A Note On Proxies). The session is also a thread local, but in the default context is persisted to a MAC-signed cookie and sent to the client.

The problem that you are running into is that session is rebuilt on each request (since it is sent to the client and the client sends it back to us), while data set on g is only available for the lifetime of this request.

The simplest thing to do (note simple != secure - if you need secure take a look at Flask-Login) is to simply add the user's ID to the session and load the user on each request:

@app.before_request
def load_user():
    if session["user_id"]:
        user = User.query.filter_by(username=session["user_id"]).first()
    else:
        user = {"name": "Guest"}  # Make it better, use an anonymous User instead

    g.user = user