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Working on a little web-dev project this afternoon and am diving into sessions for the first time with Python and Flask. Apparently when working with sessions in Flask you need to create a secret_key comprised of random bytes represented in hexadecimal. I’m sort of a high-level guy myself and am not used to working with bits, bytes, hexadecimal and whatnot, so I had to do a little googling to get up to speed and wanted to share what I learned here on the blog.

According to the official Flask documentation, you create your secret_key by assigning it a string value with this funky letter ‘b’ prefixed in front of your string literal:

# Set the secret key to some random bytes. 
# Keep this really secret!
app.secret_key = b'_5#y2L"F4Q8z\n\xec]/'

Okay, so how do you go about creating this hexadecimal code? I suggest heading over to repl.it and simply entering the following Python 3 code from my github gists to generate your hexadecimal:

topherPedersen’s Hexadecimal Conversion Tool

Generating Random Bytes in Hexadecimal