Flask throwing 'working outside of request context' when starting sub thread

Question

I am trying to start a new thread in Python inside of a Flask application. I am doing background work that gets triggered by the request, but I don't need to wait for the work to be done to respond to the request.

Is it possible to set the flask request in this sub-threat to the request that came in? Reason being, our ACL on our queries to our DB (mongoengine in front of mongoDB) relies on the request's user (it grabs it from flask's request object) to see if they have access to the objects, and its blowing up because the request is not available in the sub-thread.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

Here's pseudo code of how I am handling it now, but it is not working.

@app.route('/my_endpoint', methods=['POST'])
def my_endpoint_handler():
    #do tracking in sub-thread so we don't hold up the page
    def handle_sub_view(req):
        from flask import request
        request = req
        # Do Expensive work
    thread.start_new_thread(handle_sub_view, (request))
    return "Thanks"

Answer 1

Wrap your thread code in a test_request_context so you have access to context locals:

@app.route('/my_endpoint', methods=['POST'])
def my_endpoint_handler():
    #do tracking in sub-thread so we don't hold up the page
    def handle_sub_view(req):
        with app.test_request_context():
            from flask import request
            request = req
            # Do Expensive work
    thread.start_new_thread(handle_sub_view, (request))
    return "Thanks"

Edit: it's worth pointing out that the thread will have a different context than the original request. You need to extract any interesting request data, such as the user ID, before spawning the thread. You can then grab a (different) user object in the sub-thread using the ID.