Set Express response headers before redirect - node.js

Question

I'm implementing a site login that takes in an email/password combo, retrieves an API token, and returns it to the user to get stored (encrypted) in localStorage.
Currently, on successful POSTing to /login, the app redirects the user to the index page, with the token attached as a query, like so (as suggested here):
login.post('/', function(req, res) {
...checking password...
Auth.getToken(user, function(err, token) {
res.redirect('/?token=' + token);
});
});
This works fine, but I'd prefer to keep my URLs as clean as possible and set the token as a header instead:
login.post('/', function(req, res) {
...checking password...
Auth.getToken(user, function(err, token) {
res.set('x-access-token', token);
console.log(res._headers);
// --> {'x-powered-by': 'Express', 'x-access-token': <token>}
res.redirect('/');
});
});
console.log-ing res._headers shows that the headers are set as expected, but when I log req.headers on the request to the index page, it's not showing up:
{ host: 'localhost:3000',
connection: 'keep-alive',
'cache-control': 'max-age=0',
accept: 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8',
'upgrade-insecure-requests': '1',
'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/44.0.2403.157 Safari/537.36',
referer: 'http://localhost:3000/login',
'accept-encoding': 'gzip, deflate, sdch',
'accept-language': 'en-US,en;q=0.8',
cookie: 'ifusr=crwj; _ga=GA1.1.1933420201.1409901705',
'if-none-match': '"1195161647"' }
Any suggestions appreciated!

Answer 1

Setting headers wouldn't work here because a redirect will execute a new http request, you can use express-session to store the auth token and fetch it when you need it
req.session.accessToken = token