sessions

gorilla/sessions provides cookie and filesystem sessions and infrastructure for custom session backends.

The key features are:

• Simple API: use it as an easy way to set signed (and optionally encrypted) cookies.
• Built-in backends to store sessions in cookies or the filesystem.
• Flash messages: session values that last until read.
• Convenient way to switch session persistency (aka "remember me") and set other attributes.
• Mechanism to rotate authentication and encryption keys.
• Multiple sessions per request, even using different backends.
• Interfaces and infrastructure for custom session backends: sessions from different stores can be retrieved and batch-saved using a common API.

Let's start with an example that shows the sessions API in a nutshell:

	import (
		"net/http"
		"github.com/gorilla/sessions"
	)

	var store = sessions.NewCookieStore([]byte("something-very-secret"))

	func MyHandler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
		// Get a session. We're ignoring the error resulted from decoding an
		// existing session: Get() always returns a session, even if empty.
		session, _ := store.Get(r, "session-name")
		// Set some session values.
		session.Values["foo"] = "bar"
		session.Values[42] = 43
		// Save it before we write to the response/return from the handler.
		session.Save(r, w)
	}

First we initialize a session store calling NewCookieStore() and passing a secret key used to authenticate the session. Inside the handler, we call store.Get() to retrieve an existing session or create a new one. Then we set some session values in session.Values, which is a map[interface{}]interface{}. And finally we call session.Save() to save the session in the response.

Important Note: If you aren't using gorilla/mux, you need to wrap your handlers with context.ClearHandler or else you will leak memory! An easy way to do this is to wrap the top-level mux when calling http.ListenAndServe:

	http.ListenAndServe(":8080", context.ClearHandler(http.DefaultServeMux))

The ClearHandler function is provided by the gorilla/context package.

More examples are available on the Gorilla website.

Store Implementations

Other implementations of the sessions.Store interface:

• github.com/starJammer/gorilla-sessions-arangodb - ArangoDB
• github.com/yosssi/boltstore - Bolt
• github.com/srinathgs/couchbasestore - Couchbase
• github.com/denizeren/dynamostore - Dynamodb on AWS
• github.com/savaki/dynastore - DynamoDB on AWS (Official AWS library)
• github.com/bradleypeabody/gorilla-sessions-memcache - Memcache
• github.com/dsoprea/go-appengine-sessioncascade - Memcache/Datastore/Context in AppEngine
• github.com/kidstuff/mongostore - MongoDB
• github.com/srinathgs/mysqlstore - MySQL
• github.com/EnumApps/clustersqlstore - MySQL Cluster
• github.com/antonlindstrom/pgstore - PostgreSQL
• github.com/boj/redistore - Redis
• github.com/boj/rethinkstore - RethinkDB
• github.com/boj/riakstore - Riak
• github.com/michaeljs1990/sqlitestore - SQLite
• github.com/wader/gormstore - GORM (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite)
• github.com/gernest/qlstore - ql

Notes

Note about GetRegistry changes: As of Go version 1.7, gorilla/sessions uses the Go standard library's context package rather than gorilla/context. This required changing GetRegistry to return a shallow copy of the http Request. Users of the sessions.GetRegistry method who are upgrading to Go 1.7 will need to change calls to sessions.GetRegistry. For example, this (Go 1.6 and prior):

reg := sessions.GetRegistry(req)

will need to change to this:

var reg *Registry
reg, req = sessions.GetRegistry(req)

License

BSD licensed. See the LICENSE file for details.