persistent sessions with passport, mongodb and express

Question

I'm using passport to handle authentication and sessions in my application. I'm persisting sessions to mongodb using mongostore.

The setup works fine in general. However, when I restart the server all users are logged out, so apparently sessions are hold in memory instead of being only persisted to mongodb. I'm trying to achieve a setup where users are still logged in when restarting the server.

Basic configuration is as follows

middleware

    app.use(express.cookieParser('your secret here'));
    app.use(express.session());
    app.use(passport.initialize());
    app.use(passport.session({
        maxAge: new Date(Date.now() + 3600000),
        store: new MongoStore(
            {
                db: mongodb.Db(
                    conf.mongodbName,
                    new mongodb.Server(
                        'localhost',
                        27017,
                        {
                            auto_reconnect: true,
                            native_parser: true
                        }
                    ),
                    {
                        journal: true
                    }
                )
            },
            function(error) {
                if(error) {
                    return console.error('Failed connecting mongostore for storing session data. %s', error.stack);
                }
                return console.log('Connected mongostore for storing session data');
            }
        )
    }));

passport

passport.use(new LocalStrategy(
    {
        usernameField: 'email',
        passwordField: 'password'
    },
    function(email, password, done) {
        console.log('user %s attempting to authenticated', email);
        return User.findOne({email:email}, function(error, user) {
            if(error) {
                console.error('Failed saving user %s. %s', user.id, error.stack);
                return done(error);
            }
            if(!user) {
                return done(null, false);
            }
            console.log('user %s logged in successfully', user.id);
            return done(null, { //passed to callback of passport.serializeUser
                id : user.id
            });
        });
    }
));

passport.serializeUser(function(user, done) {
    return done(null, user.id); //this is the 'user' property saved in req.session.passport.user
});

passport.deserializeUser(function (id, done) {
    return User.findOne({ id: id }, function (error, user) {
        return done(error, user);
    });
});

github repo (including all code necessary to run code)

I created a barebone github repo including the code here

just create a conf.js file in the root directory with your mongodb credentials, i.e. mongodbURL and mongodbName, run npm install and node app.js to get started.

thanks

Answer 1

passport.session() doesn't take any configuration, as of Express version 4.X it's session() you need to configure:

app.use(session({
  cookie : {
    maxAge: 3600000 // see below
  },
  store : new MongoStore(...)
});
...
app.use(passport.session());

Also, maxAge (which should be a property of cookie) doesn't take a Date argument, but just the number of milliseconds a session should be valid.

For instructions on using the express middleware module session, you can find out more here.