Session is lost and created as new in every servlet request

Question

I have this big issue. My current session is gone every time I made a new request to Server.

I have checked in a lot of places. I can't find what's the problem. I also have included session-config in web.xml both in tomcat and application. I also enabled to accept cookies to my browsers. Tested in every browser. It's not working.

I am just developing a simple java ee applcation using JSP/Servlet. I am facing the problem only after I have deployed to tomcat in server machine.

Answer 1

Further to Joachim's answer.

I was running a local tomcat test server on port 8080 and accessing it via http://localhost:8080. The HTTP session wasn't being remembered across requests when using a recent Safari browser on OS X (probably because of the cookie handling info on short addresses mentioned in Joachim's answer).

To address this, I modified the /etc/hosts entry for localhost to add an alias for the local host with two part domain name.

127.0.0.1 localhost local.mydomain

Then, instead of going to:

http://localhost:8080 

To test my app, I used

http://local.mydomain:8080

After this, the session was correctly remembered across requests.

Answer 2

Are you connecting via http or https? For servlets the session I'd cookie has attributes 'secure' and 'httpOnly'. 'secure' means user agent will only send cookie if transport is secure (https/tls). If your connecting with http a new session is created on each request. 'httpOnly' means the cookie can not be modified by client side script.

Answer 3

If there is a load balance configuration, will must have to configurate a route in the network for preserve the requests in the same server. Otherwise, the each request will go to a different server, losing the session attribute.

Answer 4

In Your properties

  server.session.cookie.http-only=true
  server.session.cookie.secure=true

Remove these settings, it will retain your session id cookie, which is being reset with every request.

Answer 5

I experienced a stale https session cookie (my ad-hoc term) problem, due to a secure flag.

I had this problem when switching between http and https. The cookie stored by https session was never overwritten by http session. It remained in FireFox memory for eternity. It was visible in FireFox Tools / Options / Privacy / Delete single cookies where in Send for field it was Only for secure connections. Clearing this single cookie or all cookies is a workaround.

I was debugging the problem with wget, and I noticed such a header:

Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=547ddffae0e5c0e2d1d3ef21906f; Path=/myapp; Secure; HttpOnly

The word secure appears only in https connections and creates this stale cookie. It's a SecureFlag (see OWASP). There are ways to disable this flag on server side, which seems like a permanent solution, but maybe not safe.

Or is it a browser bug, that the cookie is not overwritten?

Answer 6

Edit your tomcat context.xml file and replace <Context> tag to <Context useHttpOnly="false"> , this helped me.

Answer 7

After years, I never posted the answer back here. At that time I was busy and forgot about this question. But, today I am looking for a solution in Stackoverflow as usual and saw this notification mentioning I am getting points from this Question. Seems like other developers are facing the same issue. So, I tried to recall how I solved the issue. And yes, I solved by manually put back the session id to track/maintain the session id.

Please see the code that I manually put back jsessionid inside the servlet.

HttpSession session = request.getSession();
if (request.getParameter("JSESSIONID") != null) {
    Cookie userCookie = new Cookie("JSESSIONID", request.getParameter("JSESSIONID"));
    response.addCookie(userCookie);
} else {
    String sessionId = session.getId();
    Cookie userCookie = new Cookie("JSESSIONID", sessionId);
    response.addCookie(userCookie);
}

Answer 8

One possible cause for this is having a "naked" host name (i.e. one without a domain part). That's fairly common if you're working in an Intranet.

The problem is that almost all browsers cookies will not accept cookies for hostnames without a domain name. That's done in order to prevent evilsite.com from setting a Cookie for com (which would be bad, as it would be the ultimate tracking cookie).

So if you access your applicaton via http://examplehost/ it won't accept any cookie, while for http://examplehost.localdomain/ it will accept (and return) the cookie just fine.

The nasty thing about that is that the server can't distinguish between "the browser got the cookie and ignored it" and "the browser never got the cookie". So each single access will look like a completely new sesson to the server.

Answer 9

First check if the webapp's context.xml does not have cookies="false" configured.

Further it's good to know that cookies are domain, port and contextpath dependent. If the links in the page points to a different domain, port and/or contextpath as opposed to the current request URL (the one you see in the browser's address bar), then the cookie won't be passed through which will cause that the session cannot be identified anymore and thus you will get a new one from the servletcontainer.

If that is not the cause, then check if you aren't doing a redirect on every request using HttpServletResponse.sendRedirect() for some reason. If you do this already on the very first request, then the cookie will get lost. You'll need to replace

response.sendRedirect(url);

by

response.sendRedirect(response.encodeRedirectURL(url));

Answer 10

Please verify if the session is not being invalidated in your code someplace. Look for code similar to request.getSession().invalidate();

Answer 11

Try adding the Live Http Headers plugin to firefox, and make sure the session cookie is indeed being passed to the browser from the server, and make sure the browser is sending it back again on the next request.