Session

HTTP sessions provide a way to store information about the user across multiple requests, which is particularly useful for MVC applications.

Use with Express (default)

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

$ npm i express-session
$ npm i -D @types/express-session

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

import * as session from 'express-session';
// somewhere in your initialization file
app.use(
  session({
    secret: 'my-secret',
    resave: false,
    saveUninitialized: false,
  }),
);

Warning

The default server-side session storage is purposely not designed for a production environment. It will leak memory under most conditions, does not scale past a single process, and is meant for debugging and developing. Read more in the official repository.

The secret is used to sign the session ID cookie. This can be either a string for a single secret, or an array of multiple secrets. If an array of secrets is provided, only the first element will be used to sign the session ID cookie, while all the elements will be considered when verifying the signature in requests. The secret itself should be not easily parsed by a human and would best be a random set of characters.

Enabling the resave option forces the session to be saved back to the session store, even if the session was never modified during the request. The default value is true, but using the default has been deprecated, as the default will change in the future.

Likewise, enabling the saveUninitialized option Forces a session that is "uninitialized" to be saved to the store. A session is uninitialized when it is new but not modified. Choosing false is useful for implementing login sessions, reducing server storage usage, or complying with laws that require permission before setting a cookie. Choosing false will also help with race conditions where a client makes multiple parallel requests without a session (source).

You can pass several other options to the session middleware, read more about them in the API documentation.

Hint

Please note that secure: true is a recommended option. However, it requires an https-enabled website, i.e., HTTPS is necessary for secure cookies. If secure is set, and you access your site over HTTP, the cookie will not be set. If you have your node.js behind a proxy and are using secure: true, you need to set "trust proxy" in express.

With this in place, you can now set and read session values from within the route handlers, as follows:

@Get()
findAll(@Req() request: Request) {
  request.session.visits = request.session.visits ? request.session.visits + 1 : 1;
}

Hint

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

Alternatively, you can use the @Session() decorator to extract a session object from the request, as follows:

@Get()
findAll(@Session() session: Record<string, any>) {
  session.visits = session.visits ? session.visits + 1 : 1;
}

Hint

The @Session() decorator is imported from the @nestjs/common package.

Use with Fastify

First install the required package:

$ npm i fastify-secure-session

Once the installation is complete, register the fastify-secure-session plugin:

import secureSession from 'fastify-secure-session';

// somewhere in your initialization file
const app = await NestFactory.create<NestFastifyApplication>(
  AppModule,
  new FastifyAdapter(),
);
app.register(secureSession, {
  secret: 'averylogphrasebiggerthanthirtytwochars',
  salt: 'mq9hDxBVDbspDR6n',
});

Hint

You can also pregenerate a key (see instructions) or use keys rotation.

Read more about the available options in the official repository.

With this in place, you can now set and read session values from within the route handlers, as follows:

@Get()
findAll(@Req() request: FastifyRequest) {
  const visits = request.session.get('visits');
  request.session.set('visits', visits ? visits + 1 : 1);
}

Alternatively, you can use the @Session() decorator to extract a session object from the request, as follows:

@Get()
findAll(@Session() session: secureSession.Session) {
  const visits = session.get('visits');
  session.set('visits', visits ? visits + 1 : 1);
}

Hint

The @Session() decorator is imported from the @nestjs/common, while secureSession.Session from the fastify-secure-session package (import statement: import * as secureSession from 'fastify-secure-session').