Creating user objects

Creating a new user is just like creating an entry or tag with one exception: we need to securely hash the user's password. You should never store passwords as plaintext and, due to the ever-increasing sophistication of hackers, it is best to use a strong cryptographic hash function. We will be using the Flask-Bcrypt extension to hash and check our passwords, so let's install the extension using pip:

(blog) $ pip install flask-bcrypt
...
Successfully installed Flask-Bcrypt
Cleaning up...

Open app.py and add the following code to register the extension with our app:

from flask.ext.bcrypt import Bcrypt

bcrypt = Bcrypt(app)

Now let's add some methods to the User object that will make creating and checking passwords straightforward:

from app import bcrypt

class User(db.Model):
    # ... column definitions, other methods ...

    @staticmethod
    def make_password(plaintext):
        return bcrypt.generate_password_hash(plaintext)

    def check_password(self, raw_password...