Django tip: How to set and get sessions?

Set up

Sessions comes built in with the standard Django setup. But it's always nice to just double check that "'django.contrib.sessions'," is in your list of INSTALLED_APPS in your settings.py file.

Setting sessions

In this little example, I will show you how to set a session.

def index(request):
    # String
    request.session['username'] = 'codewithstein'

    # Integers
    request.session['user_id'] = user.id

    # Booleans
    request.session['is_authenticated'] = True

    return render(request, 'index.html')

Great. Now we have a few session variables with strings, integers and boolean values.

Getting sessions

Getting sessions is also very easy.

def myaccount(request):
    # Check if "is_authenticated" is true. Default it to "False"
    if request.session.get('is_authenticated', False):
        print('You are authenticated')

    # Set username in a variable

    username = request.session.get('username', '')

    if username:
        print("Your username is %s" % username)
    
    return render(request, 'myaccount.html')

Deleting sessions

Now we know how to set and get sessions. But sometimes we want to delete them as well.

def logout(request):
    try:
        del request.session['is_authenticated']
    except KeyError:
        print("The key didn't exist")
    
    return redirect('index')

So now you know how to use sessions :-D