sharing a session between multiple node(express) processes

[afrozl]

I have an app that authenticates users and serves the views/UI. I also have a separate API server that I want should share the session info from the first app. How would I go about accomplishing this?

[shaunwarman]

It's very common to have an external session store for this exact purpose. Check out the session store section and one of the popular choices using redis as your database for fast session read/writes. This way all node processes have a shared session available via IPC/RPC.

[afrozl]

I'm already using connect-mongo as a session store. I guess the part I am missing is how to make the other node processes recognize the same session. In other words, only the UI process sets the session/session id and the other processes just piggy back off that session?

[shaunwarman]

So usually the session ID is available in the UI from the cookie. So if you are passing this information down to your API and it interacts with the same session store then you should be able to query based on session ID and get the same session information.

I am not sure of your setup, but I imagine the middleware should parse the cookie for the session ID and that's what you want. Most of this is abstracted from you.. so you only look at req.session and everything else should be handled.

[gabeio]

some notes about using multiple node processes. the secret especially, but pretty much all of the options, must be identical for every process.

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mongo session store should be fine as long as most of the servers are either on the same network or as low a ping as possible to keep the sessions fast. mongo at very high levels of sessions might loose documents or become slow (I saw a writeup about this). If possible make sure that the sessions which are expired are fully deleted or they will sit on the database even though both the session in the browser and server side have expired since I believe mongodb does not have an expire document timer though it wouldn't be hard to make that within an app.

[afrozl]

Thanks guys, I have it working now. The trick was as you said, all options, specifically the secret and key had to be the same.