SMTPServerDisconnected: please run connect() first

Question

I'm exploring flask and attempting to setup a simple web app with secure registration and sign in. I'm using flask-security to do this. Unfortunately, when I navigate to the send confirmation page I'm getting the error: "smtpserverdisconnected: please run connect() first".

Below are the relevant files I've written. run.py drives the entire application.

run.py (this is next to the app folder)

#!venv/bin/python
from app import app
app.run(debug = True)

Everything below here is in the app folder

__init__.py

from flask import Flask
from flask.ext.mail import Mail
from flask.ext.sqlalchemy import SQLAlchemy

app = Flask(__name__)
app.config.from_object('config')

db = SQLAlchemy(app)
mail = Mail(app)

import models
import views

@app.before_first_request
def create_user():
    db.create_all()
    models.user_datastore.create_user(email = '[email protected]',
            password = 'password')
    db.session.commit()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run()

models.py

from app import db, app
from flask.ext.sqlalchemy import SQLAlchemy
from flask.ext.security import SQLAlchemyUserDatastore,\
        UserMixin, RoleMixin, Security

roles_users = db.Table('roles_users',
        db.Column('user_id', db.Integer(), db.ForeignKey('user.id')),
        db.Column('role_id', db.Integer(), db.ForeignKey('role.id')))

class Role(db.Model, RoleMixin):
    id = db.Column(db.Integer(), primary_key = True)
    name = db.Column(db.String(80), unique = True)
    description = db.Column(db.String(255))

class User(db.Model, UserMixin):
    id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key = True)
    email = db.Column(db.String(255), unique = True)
    password = db.Column(db.String(255))
    active = db.Column(db.Boolean())
    confirmed_at = db.Column(db.DateTime())
    roles = db.relationship('Role', secondary = roles_users,
            backref = db.backref('users', lazy = 'dynamic'))

user_datastore = SQLAlchemyUserDatastore(db, User, Role)
security = Security(app, user_datastore)

views.py

from app import app
from flask import render_template
from flask.ext.security import login_required

@app.route('/')
@login_required
def index():
    return render_template('index.html')

edit: also, here is the config file I'm using

DEBUG      = True
SECRET_KEY = 'secret'
SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI = 'sqlite://'

SECURITY_PASSWORD_HASH = 'sha512_crypt'
SECURITY_PASSWORD_SALT = 'salt'
SECURITY_CONFIRMABLE = True
SECURITY_REGISTERABLE = True
SECURITY_RECOVERABLE = True
SECURITY_TRACKABLE = True
SECURITY_CHANGEABLE = True

MAIL_SERVER = 'smtp.zoho.com'
MAIL_PORT = 465
MAIL_USE_TLS = False
MAIL_USE_SSL = True
MAIL_DEBUG = True
MAIL_USERNAME = 'myaddress@mydomain'
MAIL_PASSWORD = 'password'

Answer 1

Alright, so I figured out what the problem was. By default flask-security is set up to send mail as "localhost". My mail provider is Zoho, but I'm just using them as a mail server for a domain I run. My mail settings are such that I can only send mail from certain addresses. Because 'localhost' is not one of these flask-security was not able to connect to Zoho's servers.

So the solution was to add to my config file the line

SECURITY_EMAIL_SENDER = 'valid_email@my_domain.com'

Hopefully this will save someone else some time trying to figure out why flask-security's email isn't working.