Implementing social login in Flask

Question

Looking to implement social authentication in our application with LinkedIn, Google, Facebook. I'm currently using flask-security to help manage users/roles in our application. I'm looking for some guidance on best practices with Flask/Flask-Security and Social Authentication.

I've seen the flask-social plugin, but I'd like to have the option of local form-based login, too.

So far, I'm planning on writing a new login view implementation for flask-security that can determine whether I'm using a social site (via passing a query parameter when user clicks on "login with XYZ") for the login. After social authentication occurs, I was planning on running the regular flask-security login to set all the appropriate session tokens and user and roles so the @login_required decorator will continue to work.

I didn't really see any hooks for overriding the login view function in flask-security, so I'm planning on either 1) copying the existing implementation into my own app or 2) calling flask_security_views::login.

However, I'm wondering if there's some of this that's already been implemented somewhere, or a better start. It seems like I'm really going to be cutting up a lot of existing code.

Thanks

Answer 1

Mark Hildreth is correct.

flask-social allows you to log in via a form (username/password) or via social. So you can use it in conjunction with flask-security, flask-login, or whatever password-based authentication you want. I have used flask-social in conjunction with flask-security and can confirm they work quite well together.

flask-social links each User object to zero or more additional social accounts, which are stored in a separate table/datastore. Thus, it does not replace the existing password infrastructure...it just augments the User model and adds additional social methods to also allow for the user to log in alternatively via social accounts.