socket.io parse connect (>= 2.4.1) signed session cookie

Question

With the latest version of connect (as of 2012-07-26), I've found the following way to get a session ID from socket.io that will work with a connect-redis store.

var express = require('express')
, routes = require('./routes')
, fs = require('fs')
, http = require('http')
, io = require('socket.io')
, redis = require('connect-redis')
, connect = require('express/node_modules/connect')
, parseSignedCookie = connect.utils.parseSignedCookie
, cookie = require('express/node_modules/cookie');

var secret = '...';
var rStore = new(require('connect-redis')(express));

//...

var server = http.createServer(app);
var sio = io.listen(server);

sio.set('authorization', function(data, accept) {
    if(data.headers.cookie) {
        data.cookie = cookie.parse(data.headers.cookie);
        data.sessionID = parseSignedCookie(data.cookie['connect.sid'], secret);
    } else {
        return accept('No cookie transmitted', false);
    }
    accept(null, true);
});

data.sessionID can then be used later such as

sio.sockets.on('connection', function(socket) {
    console.log('New socket connection with ID: ' + socket.handshake.sessionID);
    rStore.get(socket.handshake.sessionID, function(err, session) {
        //...
    });
});

Having to import so many from express (connect, a utility of connect, and the cookie module) seems like an overly roundabout way of getting the functions needed to parse connect's signed cookies. Has anyone found another way?

Shadowy

I wish I could upvote this 100+ times. Your solution above saved me lots of time, thank you for posting it! I'm sorry I can't suggest another way. – Uranian

Answer 1

I was running into the same and just wrote a tiny module to abstract it. Here's how its usage looks like. It was written and tested using express 3 so should work fine with connect 2.4.x. Please let me know otherwise.

var SessionSockets = require('session.socket.io')
  , sessionSockets = new SessionSockets(io, sessionStore, cookieParser);

sessionSockets.on('connection', function (err, socket, session) {
  //your regular socket.io code goes here
});

For more details on how it works see https://github.com/wcamarao/session.socket.io

Mckellar