How to keep alive an NodeJS Passport session

Question

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?

Answer 1

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 .