Node.js server restart drops the sessions

Question

I'm having fully functional user signup/authentication system using express and connect middleware.

app.use(express.session({store: require('connect').session.MemoryStore( {reapInterval: 60000 * 10} ) }))

The only problem is that sessions drop every time you perform server restart.

https://github.com/remy/nodemon - and nodemon restarts node.js every time it detects a file change.

How can I have persistent sessions ?

Answer 1

Like your code is telling you are using MemoryStore. This is volatile and gets cleared on restart. I would advise you to use connect_redis to persist your session. Redis is an extremely fast store.

1. Download redis
2. compile redis: make
3. Start server: ./redis-server
4. npm install connect-redis

5.  var connect = require('connect') , RedisStore = require('connect-redis'); connect.createServer( connect.cookieParser(), // 5 minutes connect.session({ store: new RedisStore }) ); 

This is just to get you started quickly. You should read the documentation and configure redis if you want to get most out of redis.

Answer 2

I was trying to get Redis on track using express.js, Google sent me here. The express implementation changed:

var express = require('express'),
RedisStore = require('connect-redis')(express);

Another important thing is the order of express configurations.

app.configure(function(){

    app.enable('strict routing'); // removes trailing slash
    app.set('views', __dirname + '/views');
    app.set('view engine', 'jqtpl');
    app.register('.html', require('jqtpl').express);
    app.use(express.favicon());
    app.use(express.methodOverride());
    app.use(express.compiler({src: __dirname + '/public', enable: ['sass']}));
    app.use(express.static(__dirname + '/public'));
    app.use(app.router);
    app.use(express.bodyParser());
    app.use(express.cookieParser());
    app.use(express.session({secret: _.config.secret, store: new RedisStore}));

});

cookieParser & session configurations need to be at the end of the configurations, and cookieParser must be placed right before express.session .

Hope that helps, I ran in both of these problems.

Answer 3

I agree with everybody about redis, but I think that different technologies is a problem in terms of software maintenance. If you are using mongodb for example there is connect-mongo ( https://npmjs.org/package/connect-mongo ), if you are using mysql there is connect-mysql ( https://npmjs.org/package/connect-mysql ), connect-couchdb for couchdb ( https://npmjs.org/package/connect-couchdb ) and so on.

Answer 4

also, if you're using express, you need to provide a secret when telling the app to use the redis middleware.

so, follow Alfred's recipe above, but do the following...

var express = require( 'express' );
var RedisStore = require('connect-redis');

app.use( express.cookieParser() );
app.use( express.session( { secret: "keyboard cat", store: new RedisStore }));

Answer 5

When node dies I would imagine the memory store you're using dies.

Persist the sessions to disk?