Flask/Python: from flask import request

Question

I read the Flask doc, it said whenever you need to access the GET variables in the URL, you can just import the request object in your current python file?

My question here is that if two user are hitting the same Flask app with the same URL and GET variable, how does Flask differentiate the request objects? Can someone tell me want is under the hood?

Answer 1

From the docs :

In addition to the request object there is also a second object called session which allows you to store information specific to a user from one request to the next. This is implemented on top of cookies for you and signs the cookies cryptographically. What this means is that the user could look at the contents of your cookie but not modify it, unless they know the secret key used for signing.

Means every user is associated with a flask session object which distinguishes them from eachother.

Answer 2

Just wanted to highlight one more fact about the requests object. As per the documentation, it is kind of proxy to objects that are local to a specific context.

Imagine the context being the handling thread. A request comes in and the web server decides to spawn a new thread (or something else, the underlying object is capable of dealing with concurrency systems other than threads). When Flask starts its internal request handling it figures out that the current thread is the active context and binds the current application and the WSGI environments to that context (thread). It does that in an intelligent way so that one application can invoke another application without breaking.