Exclude routes from renewing express cookie expiration date

[TGNC]

This issues somewhat related to - #452

In my project I need to have dynamic max-age for the set-cookie that authenticate the users. so on each request the user made to the server the max-age will get updated (in an hour or several..). However, there is several periodic routes which run every 30 seconds that shouldn't update the cookie max-age (because they are not user action). So after let say one hour the user didn't do any action in the system, the user session will get expired.

So if I configure the session with 'rooling' set to false (because there are response I don't want to update the max-age), it seem I can't get express to put 'set-cookie' with my max-age at all (on all requests).

how should I solve this kind of problem? what approach should I take to have express only update the max-age of specific requests.

For example code of the problem - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40403609/how-to-exclude-routes-from-renewing-express-cookie-expiration-date

[isidroamv]

This is not a issue related with express-session library. If you want dynamic max-age cookie expiration use the following example:

var express = require('express');
var session = require('express-session');
var app = express();

app.use(session({ secret: 'mysecret', cookie: { maxAge: 60000 }}))

// Dynamic cookie expiration
app.get('/update', (req, res) => {
    if (req.session.views) {
        req.session.views = req.session.views + 1;
        
        // Update cookie expiration
        req.session.cookie.maxAge =  req.session.cookie.maxAge  + 60000;
        
        res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'text/html');
        res.write('<p>views: ' + req.session.views + '</p>');
        res.write('<p>expires in: ' + req.session.cookie.maxAge + 's</p>');
        res.end();
    } else {
        req.session.views = 1
        res.end('Welcome. refresh!')
    }
});

// No dynamic cookie expiration
app.get('/no-update', (req, res) => {
    res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'text/html');
    res.write('<p>views: ' + req.session.views + '</p>');
    res.write('<p>expires in: ' + req.session.cookie.maxAge + 's</p>');
    res.end();
});

app.listen(3000, ()=> {
    console.log('Server running');
});

[rafaelsales]

@TGNC I'm curious how you addressed this. I needed to implement this and didn't find generic way using the lib, so this is the approach that I'm using.

// server/middleware/session.js
import session from 'express-session'

const buildSessionConfig = (options) => session({
  ...,
  rolling: options.rolling,
})

const rollingSession    = buildSessionConfig({ rolling: true })
const nonRollingSession = buildSessionConfig({ rolling: false })

export default (req, res, next) => {
  if (req.path.startsWith('/pooling/')) {
    nonRollingSession(req, res, next)
  } else {
    rollingSession(req, res, next)
  }
}

// server/index.js
import Express from 'express'
import session from 'middleware/session'

const app = Express()
app.use(session)

[rafaelsales]

To me, the ideal solution is to make the rolling option accept a function(req) => [true|false]

[HarshithaKP]

@TGNC Does the solution provided by @isidroamv helped resolving your issue ??