36 releases
0.10.1 | Sep 12, 2024 |
---|---|
0.9.0 | Jan 11, 2024 |
0.8.0 | Sep 16, 2023 |
0.7.2 | Sep 11, 2022 |
0.1.0-alpha.2 | Mar 30, 2019 |
#9 in HTTP server
59,516 downloads per month
Used in 66 crates
(37 directly)
125KB
2K
SLoC
actix-session
Session management for Actix Web.
Session management for Actix Web.
The HTTP protocol, at a first glance, is stateless: the client sends a request, the server parses its content, performs some processing and returns a response. The outcome is only influenced by the provided inputs (i.e. the request content) and whatever state the server queries while performing its processing.
Stateless systems are easier to reason about, but they are not quite as powerful as we need them to be - e.g. how do you authenticate a user? The user would be forced to authenticate for every single request. That is, for example, how 'Basic' Authentication works. While it may work for a machine user (i.e. an API client), it is impractical for a person—you do not want a login prompt on every single page you navigate to!
There is a solution - sessions. Using sessions the server can attach state to a set of requests coming from the same client. They are built on top of cookies - the server sets a cookie in the HTTP response (Set-Cookie
header), the client (e.g. the browser) will store the cookie and play it back to the server when sending new requests (using the Cookie
header).
We refer to the cookie used for sessions as a session cookie. Its content is called session key (or session ID), while the state attached to the session is referred to as session state.
actix-session
provides an easy-to-use framework to manage sessions in applications built on top of Actix Web. SessionMiddleware
is the middleware underpinning the functionality provided by actix-session
; it takes care of all the session cookie handling and instructs the storage backend to create/delete/update the session state based on the operations performed against the active Session
.
actix-session
provides some built-in storage backends: (CookieSessionStore
, RedisSessionStore
) - you can create a custom storage backend by implementing the SessionStore
trait.
Further reading on sessions:
Getting started
To start using sessions in your Actix Web application you must register SessionMiddleware
as a middleware on your App
:
use actix_web::{web, App, HttpServer, HttpResponse, Error};
use actix_session::{Session, SessionMiddleware, storage::RedisSessionStore};
use actix_web::cookie::Key;
#[actix_web::main]
async fn main() -> std::io::Result<()> {
// When using `Key::generate()` it is important to initialize outside of the
// `HttpServer::new` closure. When deployed the secret key should be read from a
// configuration file or environment variables.
let secret_key = Key::generate();
let redis_store = RedisSessionStore::new("redis://127.0.0.1:6379")
.await
.unwrap();
HttpServer::new(move ||
App::new()
// Add session management to your application using Redis for session state storage
.wrap(
SessionMiddleware::new(
redis_store.clone(),
secret_key.clone(),
)
)
.default_service(web::to(|| HttpResponse::Ok())))
.bind(("127.0.0.1", 8080))?
.run()
.await
}
The session state can be accessed and modified by your request handlers using the Session
extractor. Note that this doesn't work in the stream of a streaming response.
use actix_web::Error;
use actix_session::Session;
fn index(session: Session) -> Result<&'static str, Error> {
// access the session state
if let Some(count) = session.get::<i32>("counter")? {
println!("SESSION value: {}", count);
// modify the session state
session.insert("counter", count + 1)?;
} else {
session.insert("counter", 1)?;
}
Ok("Welcome!")
}
Choosing A Backend
By default, actix-session
does not provide any storage backend to retrieve and save the state attached to your sessions. You can enable:
-
a purely cookie-based "backend",
CookieSessionStore
, using thecookie-session
feature flag.cargo add actix-session --features=cookie-session
-
a Redis-based backend via the
redis
crate,RedisSessionStore
, using theredis-session
feature flag.cargo add actix-session --features=redis-session
Add the
redis-session-native-tls
feature flag if you want to connect to Redis using a secure connection (via thenative-tls
crate):cargo add actix-session --features=redis-session-native-tls
If you, instead, prefer depending on
rustls
, use theredis-session-rustls
feature flag:cargo add actix-session --features=redis-session-rustls
You can implement your own session storage backend using the SessionStore
trait.
Dependencies
~15–29MB
~533K SLoC