What's difference with express-session and cookie-session?

Question

I am new with Express. As Express 4.x has removed bundled middlewares. Any middleware I want to use should be required. When I read the README with express-session and cookie-session on github, I feel it hard to understand the difference.

So I try to write simple code to figure it out. I run twice for each middleware.

var express = require('express')   , cookieParser = require('cookie-parser')   , session = require('cookie-session')   , express_sess = require('express-session')   , app = express();  app.use(cookieParser()) app.use(session({ keys: ['abc'], name: 'user' })); //app.use(express_sess({ secret: 'abc', key: 'user'})); app.get('/', function (req, res, next) {     res.end(JSON.stringify(req.cookies));     console.log(req.session)     console.log(req.cookies) });  app.listen(3000); 

For cookie-session, I always get {} in my terminal.

For express-session, I get things like this.

req.session: { cookie: {       path: '/',      _expires: null,      originalMaxAge: null,      httpOnly: true     }  }  req.cookie: {user: 's:aJ97vKA5CCwxqdTj0AV1siRQ.fWusS5+qfCKICtwkfrzcZ/Gq8P0Qdx/kx8mTBhoOhGU'} 

It really confuses me. So how to explain the result with the basic use? And what's the difference between them? When should I use them?

Answer 1

Basically, express-session is more abstract, it supports different session stores (like files, DB, cache and whatnot).

And cookie-session is a simple / lightweight cookie-based (cookie is the only storage engine supported: all the session info is stored on the client, in a cookie) session implementation. This kind of sessions is probably most famous for its Rails implementation.