How to use g.user global in flask

g is a thread local and is per-request (See A Note On Proxies). The session is also a thread local, but in the default context is persisted to a MAC-signed cookie and sent to the client.

The problem that you are running into is that session is rebuilt on each request (since it is sent to the client and the client sends it back to us), while data set on g is only available for the lifetime of this request.

The simplest thing to do (note simple != secure - if you need secure take a look at Flask-Login) is to simply add the user's ID to the session and load the user on each request:

@app.before_request
def load_user():
    if session["user_id"]:
        user = User.query.filter_by(username=session["user_id"]).first()
    else:
        user = {"name": "Guest"}  # Make it better, use an anonymous User instead

    g.user = user

Minor correction, the g object is bound to the application context now instead of the request context.

"Starting with Flask 0.10 this is stored on the application context and no longer on the request context which means it becomes available if only the application context is bound and not yet a request."