I am having two subdomains, api.abc.com and beta.abc.com. Both of them are on same server (box), api.abc.com is running on port 4000 and the beta.abc.com is running on 5000. I am also using node-htty-proxy to reverse proxy the requests. beta.abc.com is used to serve only static content, while api.abc.com returns the response in json.
The user authentication is done through facebook oauth on the server (api) side. Once that is done, session is created and the user is redirected to the beta. The problem I am having here is I am not able to persist sessions! I tried giving the domain option in the cookie obj (as i had seen in other questions), even that din't work.
app.use(express.session({
secret: 'omg'
, store: new mongoStore({
url: config.db.uri
, collection: 'sessions'
})
, cookie: {
domain: ".abc.com"
, maxAge: 1000*60*60*24*30*12
}
}))
How do I go about this? Am I doing anything wrong?
I found a very similar question here.
Related
I want to share the passport authentication across multiple servers...
Here is my situation:
Server1: (app1.domain.com) authenticates user with passportjs local strategy. using cookie-session
Server2: (app2.domain.com), I want to leverage the user authentication from server1.
I am using the cookie-session middleware like so:
app.use(
session({
domain: `.${config.baseDomain}`,
cookie: {
path: '/',
domain: `.${config.baseDomain}` ,
maxAge: 60000,
},
secret: config.secret,
signed: true,
resave: true,
})
);
On Server1, the resulting req.session object is one line:
{ passport: { user: '5fdb8088ab37a78b980c2e6f' }
On Server2, req.session looks more similar to the req object, with hundred of lines.
I thought that using the same cookie-session middleware would mean that the req.session object would be identical?
I am trying to understand each step, because I am not sure where it is breaking.
The reason the req.session object was different on Server1 and Server2, is because of something that took me a while to track down, though it's painfully simple.
After isolating cookie-session as the culprit, I finally looked at my package.json to find servers had the different versions of cookie-session installed. (2.0Beta & 1.4.0) Once I installed v1.4.0 on both servers, everything works as expected.
EDIT - Oct 22, 2017
There was more than one reason our sessions weren't persisting, I've had to change ourexpress-session options to this:
api.use(session({
secret: 'verysecretsecret',
resave: false,
saveUninitialized: false,
cookie: {
path: '/',
httpOnly: true,
domain: 'domain.dev',
maxAge: 1000 * 60 * 24
},
store: new MongoStore({ mongooseConnection: mongoose.connection, autoReconnect: true })
}));
Apparently domain: 'localhost' causes express-session to start a new session every single time someone starts a session and then refreshes/navigates away and back when you have a seperate node instance for session handling.
I've solved this issue by doing the following:
Added 127.0.0.1 domain.dev to my hosts file located in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc.
I needed a place to store sessions as per the answers given below, so we chose MongoDB. This meant I had to add the following to my express-session options:store: new MongoStore({ mongooseConnection: mongoose.connection, autoReconnect: true })
Added the httpOnly: true property to the express-session options.
Because we use jQuery for our ajax requests, I had to enable some settings in the front-end web app before making calls to the back-end:$.ajaxSetup({
xhrFields: { withCredentials: true },
crossDomain: true,
});
ORIGINAL POST
I'm currently working on a platform for which was decided to have the API running on port 3001 whilst the web application itself is running on port 3000. This decision was made to make monitoring traffic more easy.
Now, we're talking about express applications so we defaulted to using the express-session npm package. I was wondering if it's at all possible to save session data stored on the node instance running on port 3001 and be retrieved by the node instance running on port 3000 if that makes sense.
To elaborate, this is our user authentication flow:
User navigates to our web app running on port 3000.
User then signs in which sends a POST request to the API running on port 3001, session data is stored when the credentials are correct, response is sent so the web app knows the user is authenticated.
User refreshes the page or comes back to the web app after closing their browser so web app loses authenticated state. So on load it always sends a GET request to the API on port 3001 to check if there's session data available, which would mean that user is logged in, so we can let the web app know user is authenticated.
(If my train of thought is at fault here, please let me know)
The problem is that express-session doesn't seem to be working when doing this.
I've enabled CORS so the web app is able to send requests to the API. And this is what the express-session configuration looks like:
api.use(session({
secret: 'verysecretsecret',
resave: false,
saveUninitialized: false,
cookie: {
path: '/',
domain: 'localhost',
maxAge: 1000 * 60 * 24
}
}));
Preferably help me solve this problem without using something like Redis, I'd simply like to know if solving this problem is possible using just express-session and node.
Preferably help me solve this problem without using something like Redis
You want us to help you solve this problem preferably without using the right tool for the job.
Without Redis you will need to use some other database. Without "something like Redis" (i.e. without a database) you will need to implement some other way to handle something that is a book example use case for a database.
And if you're going to use a database then using a database like Redis or Memcached is most reasonable for the sort of things where you need fast access to the data on pretty much every request. If you use a slower database than that, your application's performance will suffer tremendously.
I'd simply like to know if solving this problem is possible using just express-session and node.
Yes. Especially when you use express-session with Redis, as is advised in the documentation of express-session module:
https://github.com/expressjs/session#session-store-implementation
If all of your instances work on the same machine then you may be able to use a database like SQLite that stores the data in the filesystem, but even when all of your instances are on the same box, my advice would be still to use Redis as it will be much simpler and more performant, and in the case when you need to scale out it will be very easy to do.
Also if all of your session data can fit in a cookie without problems, then you can use this module:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/cookie-session
that would store all of the session data in a cookie. (Thanks to Robert Klep for pointing it out in the comments.)
After we migrated our website from http scheme to https (including enabling https on CDN and redirecting http to https on server), we found that our user sessions works incorrectly sometimes, that is, the user A would be recognized as user B! It seems the session ids of cookies are incorrectly parsed and maybe different users share the same cookies or session ids but all the session ids are generated by uid-safe uniquely.
The issue seems very strange and we really have no idea of the cause.
we use nodejs, Express, express-session with redis storage.
The express-session setup is as below:
app.use(session({
secret: 'xxxx',
cookie: {
maxAge: 3600*24*90*1000
},
store: new redisStore(),
resave: false,
rolling: true,
saveUninitialized: false
}));
I'm busy building a platform with 3 different subdomains - example.com, auth.example.com and api.example.com. They're run with 3 separate NodeJS apps running on different ports of the server.
Here is the code setting up the sessions:
var session = require("express-session");
var redisStore = require("connect-redis")(session);
var redisClient = require("redis").createClient(config.redis);
app.use(session({
secret: config.server.secret,
store: new redisStore(config.redis),
client: redisClient,
resave: false,
saveUninitialized: false,
cookie: {
domain: "example.co.za",
httpOnly: false
}
}));
The configuration is exactly the same for all 3 apps and they're sitting on the same server. For some reason, the sessions are not being shared. I seem to remember that they were being shared a few weeks back and now things are broken - I have a sneaky suspision that this happened when we moved all the traffic from HTTP to HTTPS. Would this break the sessions? I tried to turn of 'httpOnly' in case it restricted the sessions, but no luck.
I have run redid-cli MONITOR and the session is, in fact, being saved on login (Auth App) but is not being retrieved by the other app. When I turned saveUninitialized to true, the requests to save were coming from all 3 apps - this shows that they are connected to the same Redis Store.
Any help would be great.
I think this is just a cookie issue. The browser is not sending the session cookie back on your sub-domains:
you need a leading . on the domain. e.g.:
cookie: {
domain: ".example.co.za",
httpOnly: false
}
In case that doesn't work and you are having AJAX issues see this post
I have two services running on different sub-domains: 1) Node.js, Express, PassportJS, 2) PHP based. Both services are exposed in same portal, in order to avoid requiring user to enter credentials twice, we call Node.js login API from PHP server. Node returns session cookie (connect.sid), we forward this to client with domain set to <<rootdomain>>.com. Now when client calls Node.js, we can see cookie being sent to Node but still Node fails to authenticate.
I have verified following things:
Login API call from PHP server to Node returns success with connect.sid cookie and adds session entry into Redis server (We are using Redis for storing sessions)
Cookie is set correctly in browser
When browser calls Node.js connect.sid cookie is sent to server
If we call login API directly from client, everything works as expected. Basically stand alone Node app works without any issues.
I am curious whether Node uses User-agent, IP or something to validate connect.sid cookie? Or is it something related to Passport/Express session params values? What might be wrong? FYI, currently site is not running on SSL.
Here are my session params:
store = new RedisStore({
port: 6379,
host: 'localhost',
client : redis
});
var sess = {
store: store,
secret: 'some secret',
rolling: true,
cookie: { maxAge : 36000000, secure: false },
saveUninitialized: true,
resave: true,
sortName: 0,
sortModified:0,
sortSize: 0
};
Thanks in advance