openDashAuth
Dash Multi-User Authentication
Dash does not natively support multi-user authentication (at least not for free). While looking for a solution to support my own app, I noticed many developers online needed the ability to support dedicated viewpoints for individual users, but the official forums provided little to no help.
As far as I'm aware, this is the only free and publicly available solution to support multiple users within Dash (at least that is useful in a real-world application).
How it Works
Since Dash is built on top of Flask, this application uses Flask as the primary server and serves Dash as an embedded app.
This adds more benefits on top of login functionality, as this allows for the construction of a full-fledged application in addition to the dashboard view.
Flask's login-manager is used to manage the user's session. Normally, in a Flask app, routes.py defines all of the URL-page mappings. This is also where the current-user is identified to securely serve content based on whether or not the user is logged in.
By creating a method within routes that returns the current-user, one can import and reference this user in Dash, allowing for database queries based on the individual user (while simultaneously preventing the user from getting access to other user's data).
Getting Started
Simply perform a git pull to grab the files from this repo.
git clone https://github.com/seanmajorpayne/dash_multi_user_authentication
Open your terminal and navigate to the main application folder
$ cd /path/to/dash_multi_user_authentication
# The command on windows is 'dir' not 'cd'
Then run the application with docker
$ docker-compose build
$ docker-compose up
You can stop the application with
$ docker-compose down
The app is configured with a single user 'john' and password 'pw' which you can use to see the functionality provided by the app. You can add more users easily through the database. Note that the config file currently has a secret key that always amounts to true. This needs to be changed for a production application.
Security
While this template is offered 'as is' and I don't make any guarantees about security, there are a few helpful security features included. Flask-WTF forms have CSRF protection by default. Flask configures Jinja2 to automatically escape values unless explicitly told not to, which helps with cross site scripting issues.
For a full overview of Flask Security, check here
Contributions
Pull requests are welcome.
License
See the license details here
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Miguel Ginsberg for the Flask Mega Tutorial.
To Do
- Add requirements.txt
- Add License
- Clean up Bootstrap Styling