Session Middleware for Starlette/FastAPI Applications based on Flask Session Decoding and Encoding.

• starlette-flask
  • Table of Contents
  • Installation
  • Usage
  • Motivation
  • Author
  • Disclaimer
  • License

pip install starlette-flask

So what's the problem? Let's say you have a Flask application and it was live for a long time. You want to migrate to FastAPI but you don't want your users to lose their session data. And to be honest, migrating is not an easy process. You might want to take it slow and get the benefit of FastAPI features like mounting an application to another application.

Let's try to mount a Flask application to a FastAPI application.

from fastapi import FastAPI, Request, Response
from flask import Flask, jsonify, session, request
from starlette.middleware.sessions import SessionMiddleware
from a2wsgi import WSGIMiddleware

secret_key = "super-secret"


flask_app = Flask(__name__)
flask_app.config["SECRET_KEY"] = secret_key


@flask_app.get("/")
def flask_index():
    return jsonify({"message": "Hello World from Flask Application"})


@flask_app.get("/set-session")
def flask_set_session():
    session["application"] = "flask"
    session.modified = True
    return jsonify({"message": "Session set"})


@flask_app.get("/get-session")
def flask_get_session():
    return jsonify({"message": session.get("application", None)})


@flask_app.get("/delete-session")
def flask_delete_session():
    session.pop("application")
    session.modified = True
    return jsonify({"message": "Session deleted"})


@flask_app.before_request
def before_request():
    print(session.items())

@flask_app.after_request
def after_request(response):
    print(session.items())
    return response


fastapi_application = FastAPI()
fastapi_application.add_middleware(
    SessionMiddleware,
    secret_key=secret_key,
)


@fastapi_application.middleware("http")
async def starlette_add_process_time_header(request: Request, call_next):
    response = await call_next(request)
    response.headers["X-Process-Time"] = "100"
    print(response.headers)
    return response


@fastapi_application.get("/")
async def starlette_index(req: Request):
    return {"message": "Hello World from FastAPI Application"}


@fastapi_application.get("/set-session")
async def starlette_set_session(req: Request):
    req.session.update({"application": "fastapi"})
    return {"message": "Session set"}


@fastapi_application.get("/get-session")
async def starlette_get_session(req: Request):
    return {"message": req.session.get("application", None)}


@fastapi_application.get("/delete-session")
async def starlette_delete_session(req: Request):
    req.session.pop("application")
    return {"message": "Session deleted"}


app = FastAPI()
app.mount("/flask-application", WSGIMiddleware(flask_app))
app.mount("/fastapi-application", fastapi_application)

The problem here is this: If you set a session in Flask application, you can't get it from FastAPI application, and vice versa. At the same time, beyond accessing the session data, these two applications overwrite each other's session data. That's because they use different methods to sign the session data.

Since they use different methods to sign the session data, they can't decode each other's session data. What can we do? We can use starlette-flask to solve this problem.

All you need to do is this:

- from starlette.middleware.sessions import SessionMiddleware
+ from starlette_flask.middleware.sessions import SessionMiddleware

I was migrating from Flask to FastAPI and I found out that I could use my existing Flask applications with FastAPI (thanks to a2wsgi) application.

I must tell you this: Many of my Flask applications depend on third-party Flask extensions like Flask Admin, Flask Login, and Flask-JWT-Extended

So I searched how to couple Flask and FastAPI and found a way. But there was a problem... I wasn't able to access the session data between Flask and FastAPI applications. I mean I was able to CRUD session data on the Flask side and FastAPI side but I couldn't CRUD the session data inside FastAPI that was CRUDed by Flask, so I started this discussion in the FastAPI repository. Back then I wasn't able to solve this, so I decided not to use Flask Login and Flask Admin anymore...

But you can see that the discussion didn't get any answers from March to September. It was bothering me, so I decided to solve it myself. I took a look at the source code of Flask and Starlette (backend core of FastAPI). I found that they used different methods to sign the session data and Starlette kept re-signing the session data even if it wasn't created, updated, deleted, or even read, that was the problem... I needed a custom SessionMiddleware that uses the same method as Flask to sign the session data and I did implement it.

Here are some related discussions/issues/pull requests:

• Sharing Session Data between Mounted Applications · tiangolo/fastapi · Discussion #9318
• Use Base64Url encoding and decoding in Session Cookie by allezxandre · Pull Request #1922 · encode/starlette
• SessionMiddleware sends a new set-cookie for every request, with unintended results · Issue #2019 · encode/starlette
• Create More Flexable SessionMiddleware · encode/starlette · Discussion #2256
• SessionMiddleware may create malformed cookie · Issue #1259 · encode/starlette
• Added allow_path_regex to the SessionMiddleware by hasansezertasan · Pull Request #2316 · encode/starlette

Here is another related project: volfpeter/fastapi-flask-auth: Lightweight FastAPI dependencies and authenticator that uses Flask session cookies for access control. This project actually inspired me to build starlette-flask.

Check out Middleware - Starlette page to learn more about middlewares in Starlette.

• Hasan Sezer Tasan, It's me 👋

I am not a security expert. I just wanted to share my solution to this problem. If you have any suggestions, please open an issue or a pull request.

There are also some issues and discussions about problems with the default SessionMiddleware that comes with Starlette. I believe my implementation is not perfect but either the default SessionMiddleware that comes with Starlette.

starlette-flask is distributed under the terms of the MIT license.