CODEWITHSUNDEEP
django
I.Jokhadze
I.Jokhadze

Reputation: 477

Django close sessions if users moves another site or after browser close

How can I close sessions in Django if a user moves from my site to another or if he close the browser.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1585

Answers (1)

miki725
miki725

Reputation: 27861

From both the question and comments, seems you would like to "close" session when user exits your site without any aid from JS. The answer is it depends how you define "close".

Root of the problem is that HTTP is stateless. Each request coming into the server is completely independent request without any relation to any other requests which means there cannot be any state. Since state is very useful we hack HTTP to add state by using sessions. The idea is that browser sends some identifier to some state stored on the server which allows the server to retrieve that state hence give some context to the request. The key there is that the browser is sending that data. In other words, if the browser at some point will stop sending requests, (e.g. user closes the tab), the server will never know that. Therefore if you define "close" session as removing session from the server, no that cannot be possible without some JS help.

If however all you are trying to achieve is log the user out when they exit your site, that can partially be done in Django with the use of SESSION_EXPIRE_AT_BROWSER_CLOSE setting. Here are additional docs about that. The idea here is that when Django sends the session cookie back to the browser, it will indicate to it that the session cookie should expire when the browser is closed. In that case when the browser is closed, the browser itself will invalidate the session hence the user will be forced to create new session on next visit. This is partial solution since the session will still be stored on the server and I believe only works when browser is completely closed (I dont think closing tabs works but not certain). To mitigate the issue of the server accumulating old sessions, Django provides a management command clearsessions which you should run on regular basis.

Upvotes: 1

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