Question

I’m currently using the ActiveRecord-based session store for my Rails app and I have a background process which clears out inactive sessions every 30 minutes.

I’d like to switch to Rails’ new cookie-based session store but how do I set the expiry time of the session to 30 minutes, as opposed to the default ‘at end of session’ value?

Answer 1

I stumbled across this question after a conversation in the office. Just for the sake of completeness, I’ve discovered that it is possible to expire sessions after a period of inactivity and it’s built into Rails. In config/environment.rb, do something along the lines of:

config.action_controller.session = {
  :key          => 'whatever',
  :secret       => 'nottellingyou',
  :expire_after => 30.minutes
}

Check out lib/action_controller/session/cookie_store.rb#114 for the (apparently undocumented) option in action. Looks like it’s been around since the move to Rack sessions back in December 2008.