Models

Basics

Flask-Security assumes you’ll be using libraries such as SQLAlchemy, MongoEngine, Peewee or PonyORM to define a User and Role data model. The fields on your models must follow a particular convention depending on the functionality your app requires. Aside from this, you’re free to add any additional fields to your model(s) if you want.

Packaged Models

As more features are added to Flask-Security, the list of required fields and tables grow. As you use these features, and therefore require these fields and tables, database migrations are required; which are a bit of a pain. To make things easier - Flask-Security includes mixins that contain ALL the fields and tables required for all features. They also contain various best practice fields - such as update and create times. These mixins can be easily extended to add any sort of custom fields and can be found in the models module (today there is just one for using Flask-SQLAlchemy).

The provided models are versioned since they represent actual DB models, and any changes require a schema migration (and perhaps a data migration). Applications must specifically import the version they want (and handle any required migration). Your application code should import just the required version e.g.:

from flask_security.models import fsqla_v3 as fsqla

A single method fsqla.FsModels.set_db_info is provided to glue the supplied models to your DB instance. This is only needed if you use the packaged models.

Model Specification

Your User model needs a Primary Key - Flask-Security doesn’t actually reference this - so it can be any name or type your application needs. It should be used in the foreign relationship between User and Role. The WebAuthn model also references this primary key (which can be overridden by providing a suitable implementation of flask_security.WebAuthnMixin.get_user_mapping()).

At the bare minimum your User and Role model should include the following fields:

User

  • primary key

  • email (for most features - unique, non-nullable)

  • password (string, nullable)

  • active (boolean, non-nullable)

  • fs_uniquifier (string, 64 bytes, unique, non-nullable)

Role

  • primary key

  • name (unique, non-nullable)

  • description (string)

Additional Functionality

Depending on the application’s configuration, additional fields may need to be added to your database models. Note some fields are specified as ‘list of string’ the ORM you are using is responsible for translating the list of string to a suitable DB data type. For standard SQL-like databases, Flask-Security provides a utility method AsaList.

Confirmable

If you enable account confirmation by setting your application’s SECURITY_CONFIRMABLE configuration value to True, your User model will require the following additional field:

  • confirmed_at (datetime)

Trackable

If you enable user tracking by setting your application’s SECURITY_TRACKABLE configuration value to True, your User model will require the following additional fields:

  • last_login_at (datetime)

  • current_login_at (datetime)

  • last_login_ip (string)

  • current_login_ip (string)

  • login_count (integer)

Two_Factor

If you enable two-factor by setting your application’s SECURITY_TWO_FACTOR configuration value to True, your User model will require the following additional fields:

  • tf_totp_secret (string, 255 bytes, nullable)

  • tf_primary_method (string)

If you include ‘sms’ in SECURITY_TWO_FACTOR_ENABLED_METHODS, your User model will require the following additional field:

  • tf_phone_number (string, 128 bytes, nullable)

Unified Sign In

If you enable unified sign in by setting your application’s SECURITY_UNIFIED_SIGNIN configuration value to True, your User model will require the following additional fields:

  • us_totp_secrets (an arbitrarily long Text field)

If you include ‘sms’ in SECURITY_US_ENABLED_METHODS, your User model will require the following additional field:

  • us_phone_number (string, 64 bytes, nullable, unique)

Separate Identity Domains

If you want authentication tokens to not be invalidated when the user changes their password add the following to your User model:

  • fs_token_uniquifier (string, 64 bytes, unique, non-nullable)

Username

If you set SECURITY_USERNAME_ENABLE to True, then your User model requires the following additional field:

  • username (string, 64 bytes, unique, nullable)

Permissions

If you want to protect endpoints with permissions, and assign permissions to roles that are then assigned to users, the Role model requires:

  • permissions (list of UnicodeText, nullable)

WebAuthn

Flask Security can act as a WebAuthn Relying Party by enabling SECURITY_WEBAUTHN. This requires an additional table as well as references from the User model. Users can have many WebAuthn credentials, and Flask-Security must be able to locate a User record based on a credential id.

Important

It is important that you maintain data consistency when deleting WebAuthn records or users.

The ‘WebAuthn’ model requires the following fields:

  • id (primary key)

  • credential_id (binary, 1024 bytes, indexed, non-nullable, unique)

  • public_key (binary, 1024 bytes, non-nullable)

  • sign_count (integer, default=0, non-nullable)

  • transports (list of string/UnicodeText, nullable)

  • extensions (string, 255 bytes)

  • lastuse_datetime (datetime, non-nullable)

  • name (string, 64 bytes, non-nullable)

  • usage (string, 64 bytes, non-nullable)

  • backup_state (boolean, non-nullable)

  • device_type (string, 64 bytes, non-nullable) (The spec calls this Backup Eligibility)

There needs to be a bi-directional relationship between the WebAuthn record and the User record (since we need to look up the User based on a WebAuthn credential_id.

For SQLAlchemy:

Add the following to the WebAuthn model (assuming your primary key is named ``id``):

    @declared_attr
    def user_id(cls):
        return Column(
            Integer,
            ForeignKey("user.id", ondelete="CASCADE"),
            nullable=False,
        )

Add the following to the User model:

    @declared_attr
    def webauthn(cls):
        return relationship("WebAuthn", backref="users", cascade="all, delete")

For mongoengine:

Add the following to the WebAuthn model:

    user = ReferenceField("User")
    def get_user_mapping(self) -> dict[str, str]:
        """Return the mapping from webauthn back to User"""
        return dict(id=self.user.id)

Add the following to the User model:

    webauthn = ListField(ReferenceField(WebAuthn, reverse_delete_rule=PULL), default=[])

To make sure all WebAuthn objects are deleted if the User is deleted:

    User.register_delete_rule(WebAuthn, "user", CASCADE)

For peewee:

Add the following to the WebAuthn model:

    user = ForeignKeyField(User, backref="webauthn")

This will add a column called ``user_id`` that references the User model's
``id`` primary key field. It will also create a virtual column ``webauthn``
as part of the User model. Note that the default Peewee datastore implementation
calls ``delete_instance(recursive=True)`` which correctly deals with ensuring
that WebAuthn records get deleted if a User is deleted.

The User model needs the following additional fields:

  • fs_webauthn_user_handle (string, 64 bytes, unique). This is used as the PublicKeyCredentialUserEntity id value.

Recovery Codes

If SECURITY_MULTI_FACTOR_RECOVERY_CODES is set to True then the User model needs the following field:

  • mf_recovery_codes (list of string/UnicodeText, nullable)

A recovery code can be used in place of any configured second-factor authenticator (e.g. SMS, WebAuthn, …).

Custom User Payload

If you want a custom payload for JSON API responses, define the method get_security_payload in your User model. The method must return a serializable object:

class User(db.Model, UserMixin):
    id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)
    email = TextField()
    password = TextField()
    active = BooleanField(default=True)
    confirmed_at = DateTimeField(null=True)
    name = db.Column(db.String(80))

    # Custom User Payload
    def get_security_payload(self):
        rv = super().get_security_payload()
        # :meth:`User.calc_username`
        rv["username"] = self.calc_username()
        rv["confirmation_needed"] = self.confirmed_at is None
        return rv