- Adding User Login 1:16
- Tracking Visits With Sessions and Cookies 2:22
- Working with Sessions in Express 3:28
- Review: Sessions, Cookies and Express 5 questions
- Adding Log In Routes 1:39
- Creating a Login Form With Pug (Jade) 2:48
- Authenticating the Username and Password 7:28
- Creating the Profile Route and Page 3:53
- Review: Login Routes 5 questions
Preview
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Working with Sessions in Express
3:28Learn how to install express-session and add it to your application.
Now that you understand how sessions and
cookies work, let's add sessions and
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cookies to our express application
using the express session module.
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This is a package created by
the express programming team.
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It gives us middleware to handle session
logic in an express application.
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In other words, it saves us from
having to do a lot of programming.
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Let me show you how it works.
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First, in the terminal or console,
I'll switch to my project directory,
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And install expression
session by typing npm
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install express-session --save.
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Now I'll return to my text editor and
open up the app.js file.
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In order to use express session,
we have to include it,
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And then tell our application to
use the middleware it provides.
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I'll use app.use and then I pass session.
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Now the session function
takes a few parameters.
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The only required option is secret,
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which is a string that is used
to sign the session ID cookie.
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The secret adds another level
of security to our system.
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The resave option forces the session
to be saved in the session store,
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whether anything changed
during the request or not.
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And saveUninitialized forces
an uninitialized session
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to be saved in the session store.
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An uninitialized session is a new and
not yet modified session,
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and we don't want to save it,
so I set it to false.
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You can learn more about these settings
by looking over the readme for
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express session,
which I linked to in the teacher's notes.
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Believe it or not, that's all we need
to get sessions working in express.
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You can use sessions all of the time,
even for
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visitors who haven't signed
up as members of your site.
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This is useful for tracking how
anonymous users visit your site,
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which pages they visit how long
they stay on the site and so on.
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Google Analytics, for example, uses
sessions to collect website usage data.
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There's one setting for the session
object that we're not using yet.
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That's the session store setting,
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which tells express where to
save session information.
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By default, express stores all
session data in the server's memory.
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This is really only suitable for local
development, it's fast and easy to use.
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But if you had millions of users visiting
your site, storing all that session data
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in the server's RAM would quickly
overrun the server and crash the site.
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In production, you'll use some kind of
database to store session information.
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There are numerous options for
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a session store, I've linked to
a few in the teacher's notes.
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For now, we'll stick with this default
because it's fast and easy to use.
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But in the next section of this course,
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I'll show you how to add a real
session store using MongoDB.
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At this point we've added the programming
needed to use sessions, but
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we haven't yet
added the programming to create a session.
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We'll only create sessions for
logged in users.
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So we'll add that to the route whenever
a user logs in and is authenticated.
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I'll show you how to create
sessions in just a bit.
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But one thing to keep in mind is
that once you create a session,
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you can access it in the request
object in any route.
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So let's create some routes.
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