Using Twitter As Your Flask Login Provider in 6 Lines

First off, I lied about the 6 lines, but it got you here and now you can see how simple it is yourself. There are actually 40 lines I think.

When I was building Flask Ahoy! I wanted to use Twitter as the login provider. I could spend a while boring you about why (as opposed to say Google, Facebook, OpenID or Roll-Your-Own), but I'l save that for another exciting post.

I have used the extremely handy Flask-OAuth to do all the legwork so you need to install that:

Next we need some html for users to click on to sign in and sign out. Try this simple block :

Next the real code begins. In your views module you need three views:

• One to send you off to Twitter to get authorized (login)
• One to get the callback from Twitter and store your authorization credentials (twitter_authorized)
• One to log you out and tidy up (logout)

Finally we need a special little method which remembers your credentials:


Now for the sake of safety I'm going to point out a couple of things here:

• This scenario uses flask sessions (encrypted cookies) to store your Twitter OAuth token.
• When you logout, you are only destroying the twitter_user flag, you should probably destroy your credentials as well.

Good luck fellow travelers.