Initializing and using a session

If we want to maintain state between page requests, we use sessions. Express supplies middleware that takes much of the complexity out of managing sessions. In this recipe, we're going to use Express to make a session between a browser and server to facilitate a user login process.

Getting ready

Let's create a fresh project:

express login

This will create a new Express skeleton named login.

How to do it...

In our app.js file, we make the following changes to app.configure:

app.set('views', __dirname + '/views');
app.set('view engine', 'jade');
app.use(express.bodyParser());
app.use(express.methodOverride());
app.use(express.cookieParser());
app.use(express.session({secret: 'kooBkooCedoN'}));

app.use(app.router);
app.use(express.static(__dirname + '/public'));
});

Sessions are dependent on cookies, so we need both cookieParser and session middleware.

Note

Express 2 to Express 3

In Express 3, we set the secret string through cookieParser instead of session:

app.use...