RailsRackSessionCookie

By default, Rails 4+ comes with its own custom cookie storage mechanism that encrypts cookie values. It is incompatible with Rack::Session::Cookie and only necessary if you're storing sensitive information in your cookies (an antipattern).

This gem allows you to seemlessly share a cookie among rack-based web applications, provided they all use the built-in Rack::Session middleware.

How does it work?

This simply replaces the ActionDispatch cookie middleware with Rack::Session::Storage. Unfortunately you cannot run ActionDispatch's cookie middleware alongside Rack::Session::Storage because ActionDispatch overwrites env['rack.session'] with its custom cookie jar.

By using this gem, all your rack and rails apps must use Rack::Session::Storage in order to share cookies.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'rails-rack-session'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install rails-rack-session

Configuration

In config/application.rb:

config.rack_session = {
  store: :cookie,
  key: '_my_app',
  domain: '.example.com'
}

The :store key corresponds to the name of a Rack::Session class, e.g. Cookie. the :secret key is inferred from your app's secret_key_base, usually set in config/secrets.yml.

An optional :coder key can be given. By default, this is the Rack::Session::Cookie::Base64::JSON coder that serializes session data as JSON. This is more secure than Rack::Session's default marshalled hash.

Use the same keys used to configure Rack::Session. For cookie store, see http://www.rubydoc.info/gems/rack/Rack/Session/Cookie

Usage

This is a seamless drop-in as Rails' interface with the cookie store is compatible with Rack::Session::Cookie.

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/dkastner/rails-rack-session.