go-session-handler

README

go-session-handler

Go implementation of CHS session handling. It deals with two main areas:

• Loading of the session from the backend store
• Storing of the session in the backend store

The backend store is Redis.

Requirements

In order to build this library locally you will need the following:

• Go
• Git

Getting started

The library is built using the following commands:

go get ./...
go build

Packages

The library contains the the following packages:

• state
• encoding
• httpsession
• session

State

The state package handles the loading and storing of the session within the cache. The store.go has the functions to deal with loading/storing, whilst cache.go deals provides an interface for connecting to the cache (in theory this can be replaced with another cache that isn't Redis).

Encoding

The encoding package wraps a few different encoding libraries to provide standard encoding for our sessions. It provides functions for encoding and decoding both base64 and messagepack encodings.

HttpSession

The httpsession package gives the user the ability to register with an alice chain and provide a Handler.

session

The session package provides some useful helper functions to retrieve commonly used Session data from the stored Session map.

Testing

The library can be tested by running the following in the command line (in the go-session-handler directory):

goconvey

Note: this library is not a standalone service, and can only be used within services or other libraries.

Environment Variables

The following environment variables are required when integrating the session handler into any Go service. Note: this library uses gofigure to manage environment variables. These variables must not be overridden by applications using the library.

Key	Description	Scope	Mandatory
COOKIE_SECRET	The shared secret used in validating/calculating the session cookie signature	State	Y
COOKIE_NAME	The name of the cookie from which to retrieve the session ID	HttpSession	Y
DEFAULT_SESSION_EXPIRATION	Default session expiration in seconds	State	Y
CACHE_SERVER	Server address for the cache database	HttpSession	Y
CACHE_DB	The cache database number (integer)	HttpSession	Y
CACHE_PASSWORD	Password to access the cache database	HttpSession	Y

Example library usage

To use the main component of this library, the State package, add the following to the relevant package import:

• "github.com/companieshouse/go-session-handler/state"