Cookies

An HTTP cookie is a small piece of data stored by the user's browser. Cookies were designed to be a reliable mechanism for websites to remember stateful information. When the user visits the website again, the cookie is automatically sent with the request.

Use with Express (default)

First install the required package (and its types for TypeScript users):

$ npm i cookie-parser
$ npm i -D @types/cookie-parser

Once the installation is complete, apply the cookie-parser middleware as global middleware (for example, in your main.ts file).

import * as cookieParser from 'cookie-parser';
// somewhere in your initialization file
app.use(cookieParser());

You can pass several options to the cookieParser middleware:

• secret a string or array used for signing cookies. This is optional and if not specified, will not parse signed cookies. If a string is provided, this is used as the secret. If an array is provided, an attempt will be made to unsign the cookie with each secret in order.
• options an object that is passed to cookie.parse as the second option. See cookie for more information.

The middleware will parse the Cookie header on the request and expose the cookie data as the property req.cookies and, if a secret was provided, as the property req.signedCookies. These properties are name value pairs of the cookie name to cookie value.

When secret is provided, this module will unsign and validate any signed cookie values and move those name value pairs from req.cookies into req.signedCookies. A signed cookie is a cookie that has a value prefixed with s:. Signed cookies that fail signature validation will have the value false instead of the tampered value.

With this in place, you can now read cookies from within the route handlers, as follows:

@Get()
findAll(@Req() request: Request) {
  console.log(request.cookies); // or "request.cookies['cookieKey']"
  // or console.log(request.signedCookies);
}

Hint

The @Req() decorator is imported from the @nestjs/common, while Request from the express package.

To attach a cookie to an outgoing response, use the Response#cookie() method:

@Get()
findAll(@Res({ passthrough: true }) response: Response) {
  response.cookie('key', 'value')
}

Warning

If you want to leave the response handling logic to the framework, remember to set the passthrough option to true, as shown above. Read more here.

Hint

The @Res() decorator is imported from the @nestjs/common, while Response from the express package.

Use with Fastify

First install the required package:

$ npm i fastify-cookie

Once the installation is complete, register the fastify-cookie plugin:

import fastifyCookie from 'fastify-cookie';

// somewhere in your initialization file
const app = await NestFactory.create<NestFastifyApplication>(
  AppModule,
  new FastifyAdapter(),
);
app.register(fastifyCookie, {
  secret: 'my-secret', // for cookies signature
});

With this in place, you can now read cookies from within the route handlers, as follows:

@Get()
findAll(@Req() request: FastifyRequest) {
  console.log(request.cookies); // or "request.cookies['cookieKey']"
}

Hint

The @Req() decorator is imported from the @nestjs/common, while FastifyRequest from the fastify package.

To attach a cookie to an outgoing response, use the FastifyReply#setCookie() method:

@Get()
findAll(@Res({ passthrough: true }) response: FastifyReply) {
  response.setCookie('key', 'value')
}

To read more about FastifyReply#setCookie() method, check out this page.

Warning

If you want to leave the response handling logic to the framework, remember to set the passthrough option to true, as shown above. Read more here.

Hint

The @Res() decorator is imported from the @nestjs/common, while FastifyReply from the fastify package.

Creating a custom decorator (cross-platform)

To provide a convenient, declarative way of accessing incoming cookies, we can create a custom decorator.

import { createParamDecorator, ExecutionContext } from '@nestjs/common';

export const Cookies = createParamDecorator(
  (data: string, ctx: ExecutionContext) => {
    const request = ctx.switchToHttp().getRequest();
    return data ? request.cookies?.[data] : request.cookies;
  },
);

The @Cookies() decorator will extract all cookies, or a named cookie from the req.cookies object and populate the decorated parameter with that value.

With this in place, we can now use the decorator in a route handler signature, as follows:

@Get()
findAll(@Cookies('name') name: string) {}