Rack Session Cookie and Sinatra - setting and accessing data

Question

I was using Rack Session Pool, however my users would get kicked off one webserver thread onto another making the session data expire. I started toying around with just enable :sessions in Sinatra, however I am unable to use that because I have mutliple apps using Sinatra (same key it appears to be using - not sure if this is because its the same host or not)

So since my apps would break each other, I now am trying Rack Session Cookie and setting the variables (same thing as enable :sessions, but you can set the variables)

Great so that works! But now I cannot access the session data the way I was using it, in Rack Session Pool and in enable: sessions

session[:user] = nick
puts session[:user]

you get the idea...

Question is why can I access session data with session[:user] in Pool and Sinatra enable :sessions, but not in Rack Session Cookie? Am I missing anything? All I am doing is below

config.ru

  use Rack::Session::Cookie, :key => 'key',
                             :domain => "localhost",
                             :path => '/',
                             :expire_after => 14400, # In seconds
                             :secret => 'secret'

EDIT:

Did some more testing and found that it's actually putting it in the session variable, however as soon as it moves to a new method or redirection the session variable appears to be dropped (is this cookie really larger than 4KBs?!) - it can't be because enable :sessions works just fine

Answer 1

Here's what I did to fix this problem:

  use Rack::Session::Cookie, :key => 'my_app_key',
                             :path => '/',
                             :expire_after => 14400, # In seconds
                             :secret => 'secret_stuff'

Do you see the difference from the above? - No Domain, if I let Rack::Session::Cookie specify the domain or the browser (whoever does it), I have no errors between mutliple Sinatra/Rack apps...