Sessions

An HTTP session is a non-persistent data storage, which is destroyed on browser shutdown (in the default browser configuration). It can be used to store flash messages, or any temporary user-specific data. Use cookies instead if you need a more persistent client side storage.

The session is available directly from the buffalo.Context inside of a handler.

func MyHandler(c buffalo.Context) error {
  s := c.Session()
}

The Session Type

The buffalo.Session type has everything needed to work with a session during a request. Under the covers Buffalo uses the github.com/gorilla/sessions package for managing the session.

type Session
  // Clear a session of all values
  func (s *Session) Clear()
  // Delete a specific value from the session
  func (s *Session) Delete(name interface{})
  // Get a value from the session
  func (s *Session) Get(name interface{}) interface{}
  // GetOnce gets a value from the current session and then deletes it.
  func (s *Session) GetOnce(name interface{}) interface{}
  // Save a session
  func (s *Session) Save() error
  // Set a value on the session
  func (s *Session) Set(name, value interface{})

Session Store

By default Buffalo will setup a session store using sessions.CookieStore.

This can be changed when setting up a new Buffalo application using the SessionStore option:

app = buffalo.New(buffalo.Options{
  Env:         ENV,
  SessionName: "_coke_session",
  SessionStore: sessions.NewCookieStore([]byte("some session secret")),
})

The ENV variable SESSION_SECRET should be set before running the application. If this is not set, you will see a warning in your logs that your session is not secured.

For more information on this see the docs for buffalo.Options.

Storing Complex Types

It is generally considered not good practice to store complex types in a session. There are lots of reasons for this, but it is recommended to store the ID of a type, instead of the “whole” value.

Should you need to store a complex type, like a struct you will first need to register the type with the encoding/gob package.

import "encoding/gob"

func init() {
  gob.Register(&models.Person{})
}

Saving a Session

Buffalo automatically saves your session for you, so you don’t have to. If there is an error when saving the session, Buffalo will return an error through the normal error handling process.

Null Sessions for APIs

When building API servers the default cookie session store is undesirable. The sessions.Null type is the recommended replacement for the default session store.

app = buffalo.New(buffalo.Options{
  Env:          ENV,
  SessionStore: sessions.Null{},
  SessionName: "_coke_session",
})

When running buffalo new with the --api flag the default session will be set to sessions.Null.

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