How do sessions work in Express.js with Node.js?

Question

Using Express.js, sessions are dead simple. I'm curious how they actually work though.

Does it store some cookie on the client? If so, where can I find that cookie? If required, how do I decode it?

I basically want to be able to see if a user is logged in, even when the user is not actually on the site at the time (like how facebook knows you're logged in when you're on other sites). But I suppose to understand that I should first understand how sessions work.

Answer 1

Overview

Express.js uses a cookie to store a session id (with an encryption signature) in the user's browser and then, on subsequent requests, uses the value of that cookie to retrieve session information stored on the server. This server side storage can be a memory store (default) or any other store which implements the required methods (like connect-redis).

Details

Express.js/Connect creates a 24-character Base64 string using utils.uid(24) and stores it in req.sessionID. This string is then used as the value in a cookie.

Client Side

Signed cookies are always used for sessions, so the cookie value will have the following format.

[sid].[signature]

Where [sid] is the sessionID and [signature] is generated by signing [sid] using the secret key provided when initializing the session middleware. The signing step is done to prevent tampering. It should be computationally infeasable to modify [sid] and then recreate [signature] without knowledge of the secret key used. The session cookie is still vulnerable to theft and reuse, if no modification of [sid] is required.

The name for this cookie is

connect.sid

Server Side

If a handler occurs after the cookieParser and session middleware it will have access to the variable req.cookies. This contains a JSON object whose keys are the cookie keys and values are the cookie values. This will contain a key named connect.sid and its value will be the signed session identifier.

Here's an example of how to set up a route that will check for the existence of the session cookie on every request and print its value to the console.

app.get("/*", function(req, res, next) {

    if(typeof req.cookies['connect.sid'] !== 'undefined') {
        console.log(req.cookies['connect.sid']);
    }

    next(); // Call the next middleware
});

You'll also need to make sure the router (app.use(app.router)) is included after cookieParser and session in your configure section.

The following is an example of the data stored internally by Express.js/Connect.

{
  "lastAccess": 1343846924959,
  "cookie": {
    "originalMaxAge": 172800000,
    "expires": "2012-08-03T18:48:45.144Z",
    "httpOnly": true,
    "path": "/"
  },
  "user": { 
    "name":"waylon",
    "status":"pro"
  }
}

The user field is custom. Everything else is part of session management.

The example is from Express 2.5.