How to access Apache Basic Authentication user in Flask

You can find authentication information in Flask from the request object.

from flask import requestdef my_view():    auth = request.authentication    username = auth.username    password = auth.password    ...

Note however that if you're using apache mod_wsgi, you'll need to turn on the WSGIPassAuthorization directive in your virtualhost config. Otherwise apache will consume the authentication header and won't pass it to the WSGI layers.

<virtualhost *:443>    ...    WSGIPassAuthorization On    ...</virtualhost>

more info here and here.

I eventually found it, it's available as:

request.environ.get('REMOTE_USER')

Not knowing this wasn't my only problem however, in caseit's useful for anyone, here's the story:

Firstly I tried to find out if WSGI was passing the authenticationinfo through to flask. This answer to a different question was veryhelpful (it shows you how to see everything WSGI is providing beforeit gets to flask):

https://stackoverflow.com/a/1151129/1956954

When I list the WSGI info as per that answer, it didn't have theuser information. But that turned out to be because the setup forapache basic authentication in the relevant sites-enabled apacheconfig file was configured for the document root (a htdocs folder).Since I'm using WSGI to redirect the relevant requests to a folderoutside of the document route, I didn't actually have authenticationturned on for my page. (And I didn't notice that because I had accessedsome pages under htdocs, been forced to authenticate, and assumed thatI wasn't being asked to authenticate when I went to my flask pagesbecause the authentication had been cached).Creating another section in the relevant apache sites-enabledfile setting up authentication for my flask directories enabled authentication