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problem : Deploying a Python Flask application to IIS can be a smooth process, but sometimes you will run into issues that require careful troubleshooting. One such issue is that Flask applications fail to retrieve the Windows Authentication user ID when using HttpPlatformHandler. While we were able to retrieve the user details successfully using WFastCGI, we were not able to do so using HttpPlatformHandler. Let’s take a look at how to retrieve the user details in such a scenario.

Some pointers:

Moving from WFastCGI to HttpPlateFormHandlers: WFastCGI is no longer maintained, see here.

Configuring a Python Web App for IIS – Visual Studio (Windows) | Microsoft Learn

Configuration adjustment:

The key steps are to enable: ForwardWindowsAuthToken In the options Http platform handler Configuration. This setting passes the Windows Authentication token to your application so that you can access and process it within your code.

Code implementation:

After adjusting the configuration, you can update your Flask application code to retrieve the Windows Authentication user ID. The following code snippet shows how this can be done.

This code snippet demonstrates how to impersonate a logged in user and retrieve their username using the win32api and win32security modules. The key element here is the x-iis-windowsauthtoken header, which contains the Windows authentication token passed in from the HttpPlatformHandler.

Dependency Guarantee:

Make sure you have the pywin32 package installed, as it provides the functionality needed to interact with the Windows API from within the Python environment.

For more information, see the following resources: