Rack Session Cookie and Sinatra - setting and accessing data - ruby

I was using Rack Session Pool, however my users would get kicked off one webserver thread onto another making the session data expire. I started toying around with just enable :sessions in Sinatra, however I am unable to use that because I have mutliple apps using Sinatra (same key it appears to be using - not sure if this is because its the same host or not)
So since my apps would break each other, I now am trying Rack Session Cookie and setting the variables (same thing as enable :sessions, but you can set the variables)
Great so that works! But now I cannot access the session data the way I was using it, in Rack Session Pool and in enable: sessions
session[:user] = nick
puts session[:user]
you get the idea...
Question is why can I access session data with session[:user] in Pool and Sinatra enable :sessions, but not in Rack Session Cookie? Am I missing anything? All I am doing is below
config.ru
use Rack::Session::Cookie, :key => 'key',
:domain => "localhost",
:path => '/',
:expire_after => 14400, # In seconds
:secret => 'secret'
EDIT:
Did some more testing and found that it's actually putting it in the session variable, however as soon as it moves to a new method or redirection the session variable appears to be dropped (is this cookie really larger than 4KBs?!) - it can't be because enable :sessions works just fine

Here's what I did to fix this problem:
use Rack::Session::Cookie, :key => 'my_app_key',
:path => '/',
:expire_after => 14400, # In seconds
:secret => 'secret_stuff'
Do you see the difference from the above? - No Domain, if I let Rack::Session::Cookie specify the domain or the browser (whoever does it), I have no errors between mutliple Sinatra/Rack apps...

Problem is with the domain 'localhost'. This thread describes in more details as to why having localhost as the domain wouldn't work: Cookies on localhost with explicit domain
A fix would be to setup a domain in your hosts file like
127.0.0.1 superduper.dev
Then set your domain in your sessions settings to superduper.dev. Then during development you can go to whatever port you might need. Ex. superduper.dev:5000

Related

Sinatra/1.4.3 use Rack::Session::Cookie warning

my configuration code
require 'sinatra'
#set :environment, :production
enable :sessions
enable :logging
set run: true
case
when production?
set port: 8081
when development?
require 'sinatra/reloader'
require 'better_errors'
use BetterErrors::Middleware
BetterErrors.application_root = __dir__
end
use Rack::Session::Cookie, key: 'N&wedhSDF',
domain: "localhost",
path: '/',
expire_after: 14400,
secret: '*&(^B234'
get '/' do
erb :hello
end
It still shows a warning:
SECURITY WARNING: No secret option provided to Rack::Session::Cookie.
This poses a security threat. It is strongly recommended that you
provide a secret to prevent exploits that may be possible from crafted
cookies. This will not be supported in future versions of Rack, and
future versions will even invalidate your existing user cookies.
but it doesn't show up on production
the question is, why does it still show the warning even if the Rack::Session::Cookie already set?
You are using both
enable :sessions
which makes Sinatra setup cookie based sessions, and
use Rack::Session::Cookie, ...
which also adds sessions to your app, so you end up with two instances of Rack::Session::Cookie in your middleware stack.
The warning is being generated by the session middleware included by Sinatra. By default Sinatra doesn’t create a session secret when running in the development environment (in classic mode at least, it does for modular apps), and so Rack generates the warning in development.
You should only need one of the two ways of enabling sessions, using two together could result in them interacting in unexpected ways.
To avoid the warning, you can explicitly set a secret for the Sinatra session with the session_secret option:
enable :sessions
set :session_secret, '*&(^B234'
You can also pass the options hash as an argument when enabling sessions. Instead of enable :sessions, do this:
set :sessions, key: 'N&wedhSDF',
domain: "localhost",
path: '/',
expire_after: 14400,
secret: '*&(^B234'

Sessions in sinatra app being shared across browsers

I'm using Sinatra framework to make a very simple web app that requires a session for login.
I can login just fine, but when my friends visit the site they are logged in as me. I had a friend sign-up. When I re-visited the site I was logged in as her!! We're 3000 miles apart on different devices.
Here is the gist of my login code..
require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'
# I have tried enabling/disabling the :session_secret
# set :session_secret, 'my_secret'
enable :sessions
before '*' do
begin
User.login(User.find(session[:me])) if session[:me]
end
end
post '/login' do
user = User.find_by_email!(params[:email]).authenticate!(params[:password])
session[:me] = user.id
User.login user
200
end
I also tried adding this to my rackup file
use Rack::Session::Cookie,
:key => 'my_app_key',
:path => '/',
:expire_after => 14400, # seconds
:secret => 'secret_stuff'
The issue is both on production and development environments.
Sinatra documentation does not recommend any config beyond enable :sessions
http://www.sinatrarb.com/faq.html#sessions
User.login(User.find(session[:me])) if session[:me]
class User
def self.login(user)
##me = user
end
end
Here's your problem. Class variables persist, even between requests.
You login
User ##me gets set to your user
Someone elses visits the site.
session[:me] is nil since there is no session yet
User.login is not called, which would either set User ##me to a user or to nil.
So when there is no session[:me], User ##me doesn't get changed.
In short, do not use class variables to store information that should only persist for a single request.

Sinatra not persisting session with redirect on Chrome

Sinatra is not persisting my session with a redirect on Chrome. It is creating an entirely new session and i'm losing all my previous session data.
As an example (similar to the Sinatra docs), i'm doing something like this:
enable :sessions
get '/foo' do
session[:user_id] = 123
session[:session_id] # "ABC", for example
redirect to('/bar')
end
get '/bar' do
# this is "DEF" when responding to Chrome (wrong),
# but "ABC" when responding to Firefox or Safari (right)
session[:session_id]
# this is nil when responding to Chrome (wrong),
# but 123 when responding to Firefox or Safari (right)
session[:user_id]
end
I'm thinking this has something to do with how the different browsers respond to handling the session after a redirect response. Has anyone seen something similar to this, or have any ideas on how to resolve this while still using sessions?
Thanks in advance!
Add this to your main app file:
use Rack::Session::Cookie, :key => 'rack.session',
:path => '/',
:secret => 'some-random-string'
With that added, you should be able to assign session['whatever'] and have it work as expected.
By doing enable :sessions you just get access to session per request.
Sinatra has no way to keep the reference to the previous call (your redirect) as it is treated as another request.
Thus, long story short:
set :session_secret, "SecureRandom.new(10) generated thing"
enable :sessions
always use enable :sessions with a secret, otherwise your session is recreated every time rack sees a request.
Please try to disable all custom cookie managament extensions is Chrome if any.
After that check headers in Developer tools → Network. Should see 'Cookie:' field.
I think that just because you didn't set :session_secret, refer to my answer on here

Sinatra session members "disappearing"

I've successfully troubleshooted an issue with session members not being available even though they were set and would like to know why it's happening. My situation can be described as:
Sinatra app using :session.
Using oAuth to authorise users and in the process setting a :ret_url session member so that the app knows where to come back to after auth.
Server is unicorn on Cedar stack (Heroku)
This works perfectly whilst running locally but the :ret_url session member was completely disappearing from the session on Heroku. I found that if I removed this code it fixed the problem:
before do
cache_control :public, :must_revalidate, :max_age => 60
end
Question 1: I'm guessing that my cookie was being cached without the :ret_url value and that's why it was breaking?
Question 2: I was setting the session member as shown in the route condition code below, is this the wrong place to do it?
# redirect users to login if necessary
set(:auth) do |access_token|
condition do
if request.request_method == 'GET'
session[:ret_url] = request.path_info
end
redirect '/' unless user_logged_in?
end
end
I'd like to use cacheing and still have my cookie be valid.
Hard to see what is going on without knowing all details, but there is a simple rule that you are most probably violating: do not use http caching on actions that are supposed to do something (other than just show page). When http caching is on, you browser does not even try to re-load the page and renders it from browser cache.
Cookies are not cached anywhere, the only thing cache_control does is setting CacheControl http response value
In your case the best thing you can do is to add list of routes that have no-action pages to your before block:
before '/my/static/page' do
cache_control :public, :must_revalidate, :max_age => 60
end
Most probably you will have very limited set of routes where you can benefit from http caching
A chap by the name of Ari Brown (waves at Ari), who is not a member here but deserves the credit for this answer, pointed me at the right solution, which is, as per the Sinatra FAQ, to not use enable :sessions but to use Rack::Session::Cookie as per
use Rack::Session::Cookie, :key => 'rack.session',
:domain => 'foo.com',
:path => '/',
:expire_after => 2592000, # In seconds
:secret => 'change_me'
I've added this into my config.ru and all is well.
I also noticed over in this post the alternative suggestion to set :session_secret, 'change_me' and, indeed, to do this via an environment variable, namely:
$ heroku config:add SESSION_KEY=a_longish_secret_key
then in your app
enable :sessions
set :session_secret, ENV['SESSION_KEY'] || 'change_me'
Obviously you can use the environment variable strategy with the Rack::Session::Cookie approach too. That's the way I went as it offers more flexibility in configuration.
The reason these work is that the cache controller middleware is farming requests out to multiple server instances and without setting a session secret it's just making one up per server, and thus breaking the sessions.

How to set default cookie domain in Rails3

I want to set default cookie domain for my application to ".mydomain.com" to allow cookie session be preserved across subdomains. There are many places showing how to do it in Rails 2.x but these solutions doesn't work for Rails3. Anyone know how can I set it?
I've found the solution. Here it is:
Rails.configuration.session_store :cookie_store, {
:key => '_your_app_session',
:domain => ".domain.com"
}
This should go into config/initializers/session_store.rb. Works great for me.

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