Express session not persisting

I'm trying to set up a basic session system in node. Here's what I've got so far:

app.js:

app.use(express.cookieParser('stackoverflow'));
app.use(express.session());

I'm setting the session data in ajax.js:

addClassToCart: function(req, res) {
  req.session.cart = req.body.classId;
  console.log(req.session.cart);
}

This logs the correct information. However, when I try to retrieve that information elsewhere (same file, different function):

console.log(req.session.cart);

I get undefined. I feel like I'm missing something incredibly basic. Various tutorials for this are either awful or require me to add in even more packages (something I'm trying to avoid).

More data from my debugging:

  • This works with non-AJAX requests
  • The session is set before it's logged.

As it turns out, the issue wasn't with Express' session (as the other answers seem to think). Rather, it was a misunderstanding on my part. I changed addClassToCart to the following:

addClassToCart: function(req, res) {
    req.session.cart = req.body.classId;
    console.log(req.session.cart);
    res.send('class added');
  }

Adding res.send() fixed the problem.

I don't know about basic session store, but redis only took me a few minutes to setup:

  app.use(express.session({
    store: new RedisStore({
      host: cfg.redis.host,
      db: cfg.redis.db
    }),
    secret: 'poopy pants'
  }));

On a mac:

brew install redis


app.use(express.session({
  secret: "my secret",
  store: new RedisStore,
    cookie: { secure: false, maxAge:86400000 }
}));

Not sure the problem is in session age, but it just to be safe, I'd suggest you to specify maxAge.