CODEWITHSUNDEEP
node.jsexpresspassport.js
T Nguyen
T Nguyen

Reputation: 3415

How to keep alive an NodeJS Passport session

We're Node + Express + Passport for authentication, and persisting the session info to Redis. I have maxAge set on the session cookie, to time out in one hour. That all seems to be working fine but the problem is, the session cookie will expire in one hour regardless of the user's activity.

Is there a way I can manually refresh/keep alive the session cookie?

Upvotes: 10

Views: 11465

Answers (4)

Rakesh Raman
Rakesh Raman

Reputation: 1

Try this code:

app.use(session({ secret: 'Category', cookie: { maxAge: 6000000 }, resave: true, saveUninitialized: false}));

Upvotes: 0

aap
aap

Reputation: 907

You'll likely want to use the "rolling" option for your session. This "forces a cookie set on every response" and "resets the expiration date." You want to set rolling to true.

Also pay attention to the "resave" option. That "forces session to be saved even when unmodified..." You'll likely want to set that option to true as well. Note that even though the default value is true for this option, you should set the value explicitly. Relying on the default for this option, rather than setting it explicitly, is now deprecated.

Try something like:

app.use( session( { secret: 'keyboard cat',
                    cookie: { maxAge: 60000 },
                    rolling: true,
                    resave: true, 
                    saveUninitialized: false
                  }
         )
);

Here's the documentation. Look under "Options" and "options.resave": https://github.com/expressjs/session .

Upvotes: 14

ragamufin
ragamufin

Reputation: 4162

Yes you can! If the cookie is unchanged on a request then it will not be resent to the browser, you can check in the developer tools under cookies to verify that. So what some, including myself like to do is to change the cookie on request where there is user activity that should extend the session. Something like the following:

req.session.lastAccess = new Date().getTime();

Another thing I've seen but I've had trouble with is to use the Session#touch:

req.session.touch()

Upvotes: 5

Dan Kohn
Dan Kohn

Reputation: 34337

Yes, you can manually reset the maxAge for each cookie after the user logs in:

req.session.cookie.maxAge = 60 * 60 * 1000;

Here is the connect session documentation.

Upvotes: 0

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