Introduction

When building out my first ever full-stack python/react project I came across an interesting conundrum. I knew that I wanted my website to essentially "read only" unless the person navigating through it was a logged in user. Initially I thought I may have to simply conditionally render many components of the website by setting a state for a logged-in user, building a whole lot of ternaries, and so forth, and so forth...

Then, I came across the functools module. This module provides a powerful toolset for functional programming. One of its most commonly used features is the ability to create function decorators, which allow you to modify the behavior of functions without changing their source code. In this blog post, I'll explore how to leverage the functools module to implement the @login_required decorator in an app.py file. By using this decorator, you can easily enforce authentication and authorization checks in your web application.

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