Django "Remember Me" with built-in login view and authentication form

Question

How can I reuse the original admin login() and AuthenticationForm to set longer cookie length for users with "remember me" option checked at login page? I am currently using the built-in login through urls.py

url(r'^login/$','django.contrib.auth.views.login', {'template_name': 'authentication/login.html'}, name='login'),

The checkbox is implemented in my login.html as:

<label><input name="remember_me" type="checkbox">Keep me logged in</label>

but I am not sure how to pass that information through the AuthenticationForm to the django.contrib.auth.views.login

Currently, if the user logs "remember me" box unchecked, the cookie age is defined in settings.py

SESSION_COOKIE_AGE = 360

I found couple of similar questions but I don't think this should require a separate app to be installed. The below snippet (http://djangosnippets.org/snippets/1881/) seemed promising but I have coded python and Django only for couple of months and I wasn't able to get it working:

def login(request, *args, **kwargs):
    if request.method == 'POST':
        if not request.POST.get('remember_me', None):
            request.session.set_expiry(0)
    return auth_views.login(request, *args, **kwargs)

Answer 1

The django session cookie age is defined in seconds.

SESSION_COOKIE_AGE = 360

means that the session will expire after 6 minutes. I've recently implemented the 'Remember Me' feature and I set the following:

SESSION_COOKIE_AGE = 60 * 60 * 24 * 30 # One month

The login view needs override as you've shown in the snippet.

But sounds like you're having an odd issue where closing the browser (when remember me is unchecked) is not requiring the user to re-login which should not happen if you use set_expiry(0). When you use set_expiry(0), the django sets a 'session' length cookie as opposed to a fixed length cookie and by design it would expire after browser close.

There's another settings that affects clearing cookie on browser close. Maybe you can try altering the SESSION_EXPIRE_AT_BROWSER_CLOSE setting's value or check it's existing value in your configuration. https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.2/topics/http/sessions/#browser-length-sessions-vs-persistent-sessions