How to get current user when implementing Python Flask-Security?

Question

I am using Flask-Security to set up user authentication for my app but I am struggling with getting the email address or ID of the currently logged in user so I can query a table with that particular users details. I've just using the standard code.

Another question here suggested the following but it didn't work:

my_user = current_user.get_id()

Standard code:

from flask import Flask, render_template
from flask_sqlalchemy import SQLAlchemy
from flask_security import Security, SQLAlchemyUserDatastore, \
    UserMixin, RoleMixin, login_required

# Create app
app = Flask(__name__)
app.config['DEBUG'] = True
app.config['SECRET_KEY'] = 'super-secret'
app.config['SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI'] = 'sqlite://'

# Create database connection object
db = SQLAlchemy(app)

# Define models
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'))

# Setup Flask-Security
user_datastore = SQLAlchemyUserDatastore(db, User, Role)
security = Security(app, user_datastore)

# Create a user to test with
@app.before_first_request
def create_user():
    db.create_all()
    user_datastore.create_user(email='[email protected]', password='password')
    db.session.commit()

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

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

Answer 1

Michael was half right, the issue is that the standard code example does not import sessions and whilst flask-security does in the back end set the session, it's not available in your flask app. This code from Michael:

@app.route('/login', methods=['GET', 'POST'])
def login():
    if request.method == 'POST':
        session['username'] = request.form['username']
        session['email'] = request.form['email']

Whilst correct in a standard app would likely break with flask-security or at least be unnecessary as flask-security completely takes control of the /login route and handles the form securely. The only two changes needed to the flask example app are:

Changing the flask import line to:

from flask import Flask, render_template, session

This is an example of getting the user id from the session:

@app.route('/dashboard')
@login_required
def dashboard():
    user_id = session["user_id"]
    return name

Hope this helps someone as it took me a while to get my head around..