Mocha chai request and express-session

Question

When using two nested chai requests, session get lost.

chai.request(server)
    .post('/api/v1/account/login')
    .send({_email: '[email protected]', _password: 'testtest'})
    .end(function(err, res){
        chai.request(server)
        .get('/api/v1/user/me')
        .end(function(err2, res2){
            //here i should get the session, but its empty
            res2.should.have.status(200);
            done();
        });
    });

And i'm pretty sure that it's an error in my mocha test, because i tried it (the login and then retrieving the session) outside the test and the session is being setted.

Answer 1

express itself does not have any native session support. I guess you are using some session middleware such as https://github.com/expressjs/session.

Meanwhile, I guess you are using chai-http plugin to send HTTP request. In chai-http, in order to retain cookies between different HTTP requests (so that req.session can be available in express side), you need to use chai.request.agent rather than chai.

Here is a simple example for your code:

var agent = chai.request.agent(app);
agent.post('/api/v1/account/login')
     .send({_email: '[email protected]', _password: 'testtest'})
     .then(function(res){
             agent.get('/api/v1/user/me')
                  .then(function(res2){
                      // should get status 200, which indicates req.session existence.
                      res2.should.have.status(200);
                      done();
     });
});

For chai.request.agent, you can refer to http://chaijs.com/plugins/chai-http/#retaining-cookies-with-each-request