Angular 7 / Express Session not persisting

Question

I have an Angular 7 app connecting to a Express API backend and the session doesn't seem to persist.

In Express I have the following endpoint:

router.get('/getsession', function(req, res) {
    console.log(`Session ID: ${req.session.id}`);
    res.status(200).json({ sessionid: req.session.id });
});

Here's an example of the output for two consecutive runs of /getsession:

Session ID: NMi8AXhX1wf9xui0WDFwENZ_3QON_iYN

Session ID: pNWcPTeJVlC8rKySw6ty5xSPa9sSME8x

I've enabled the Credentials header for Express, so it will accept it:

const cors = require("cors"); 
app.use(cors({
  credentials: true,
}));

And I've also enabled withCredentials for Angular HttpClient, so that it will send the cookie along with the POST request:

API_URL: string = "http://localdev.com:4200/api";
options = {
  headers: new HttpHeaders({
    'Content-Type' : 'application/json',
    'Cache-Control': 'no-cache',
    'Credentials': 'same-origin'
  }),
  withCredentials: true,
}

getSessionInfo() {
  return this.http.get(`${this.API_URL}/users/getsession`, { withCredentials: true })
  .pipe(
    catchError(this.handleError)
  )
}

There's an Angular proxy from localhost:4200 to localhost:4044 so the API requests can be processed.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks in advance :)

EDIT: Interestingly enough, the cookie is being passed properly onto Express, however it's still creating a new session for each request. The following is the result of req.session when calling the /getsession endpoint.

{ 'if-none-match': 'W/"b8-afvqPuftgTLN3Wn5o/ZQx8jUsv0"',

cookie: '_ga=GA1.2.1851469997.1544357368; _gid=GA1.2.1246771476.1544357368; _gat_gtag_UA_99682244_1=1',

'accept-language': 'en-US,en;q=0.9,bg;q=0.8,mt;q=0.7',

'accept-encoding': 'gzip, deflate',

referer: 'http://localdev.com:4200/user/register',

'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.0.3578.80 Safari/537.36',

accept: 'application/json, text/plain, /',

connection: 'close',

host: 'localdev.com:4044' }

Session ID: XWKGlJPrzYeRBU3Hi7RIAaWpowGU6Fuz

{ 'if-none-match': 'W/"b8-mMGAHD1Tmbv1r5T+YChLkQoq988"',

cookie: '_ga=GA1.2.1851469997.1544357368; _gid=GA1.2.1246771476.1544357368; _gat_gtag_UA_99682244_1=1',

'accept-language': 'en-US,en;q=0.9,bg;q=0.8,mt;q=0.7',

'accept-encoding': 'gzip, deflate',

referer: 'http://localdev.com:4200/user/register',

'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.0.3578.80 Safari/537.36',

accept: 'application/json, text/plain, /',

connection: 'close',

host: 'localdev.com:4044' }

Session ID: T4SnSqGfo9lOWGpiyPQS0LLJgXsRnZ4T

Neekoy Neekoy · Accepted Answer · 2018-12-09T13:23:10

Figured it out. When running in a dev environment without and SSL certificate, the cookie gets sent properly with the above configuration, however you also need to set the cookie secure to false so that it will be used.

Did it the following way:

let sessionMiddleware = session({
    secret: 'mysecret',
    saveUninitialized: true,
    resave: true,
    cookie: { secure: false },
    store: new MemcachedStore({
        hosts: ['127.0.0.1:11211'],
    })
});

Angular 7 / Express Session not persisting

1 Answers