Question

How can I do this

request.session['key'] = 'value'

for the user which user_id is 47?

Keep in mind that I’m not currently logged in with that user, I want to do it in shell.

Answer 1

See the section of the Session docs entitled “Using sessions out of views”.

The problem though is that Django doesn’t store the user with the session (by design, for security purposes). So the only way to retrieve a session is through it’s key. That key is stored with the user’s client and passed to the server to associate the session with the logged in user. In other words, you’re going to have a hard time determining which session belongs to which user.

More to the point, the session data is actually encrypted in the database as well, so there’s not even any way to query directly for the user id stored in it. The following will work, but you’ll have to query each session one by one to get the right user. Depending on how many sessions your database currently has, this could be extremely expensive. Mark as USE AT YOUR OWN RISK

from django.contrib.sessions.models import Session
from django.contrib.sessions.backends.db import SessionStore

for session in Session.objects.all():
    data = SessionStore().decode(session.session_data)
    if data.get('_auth_user_id') == user_id_you_want:
        user_session = SessionStore(session_key=session.session_key)
        # you can modify the session data here like normal, then:
        user_session.save()