For very simple applications HTTP Basic Auth is probably good enough. Flask makes this very easy. The following decorator applied around a function that is only available for certain users does exactly that:
from functools import wraps
from flask import request, Response
def check_auth(username, password):
"""This function is called to check if a username /
password combination is valid.
"""
return username == 'admin' and password == 'secret'
def authenticate():
"""Sends a 401 response that enables basic auth"""
return Response(
'Could not verify your access level for that URL.\n'
'You have to login with proper credentials', 401,
{'WWW-Authenticate': 'Basic realm="Login Required"'})
def requires_auth(f):
@wraps(f)
def decorated(*args, **kwargs):
auth = request.authorization
if not auth or not check_auth(auth.username, auth.password):
return authenticate()
return f(*args, **kwargs)
return decorated
To use this decorator, just wrap a view function:
@app.route('/secret-page')
@requires_auth
def secret_page():
return render_template('secret_page.html')
If you are using basic auth with mod_wsgi you will have to enable auth forwarding, otherwise apache consumes the required headers and does not send it to your application: WSGIPassAuthorization.
This snippet by Armin Ronacher can be used freely for anything you like. Consider it public domain.