Automatically Expiring Sessions in Rails

Posted 05/22/2007 by naffis 4 CommentsAdd Your Comment

SessionExpiration is plugin that allows you to expire sessions after X seconds of inactivity. Useful for when you want to automatically log out users if they’re idle.

Trac: http://trac.intridea.com/trac/public

Subversion repository: http://svn.intridea.com/svn/public/session_expiration/

Installation: 
script/plugin install http://svn.intridea.com/svn/public/session_expiration

OR

cd vendor/plugins
svn co http://svn.intridea.com/svn/public/session_expiration

Specify when to expire session in your ApplicationController to do it site wide or you can do it for specific controllers:

class ApplicationController
  expire_session_in 5.minutes
end

If you want to run a method when the session expires use this:

class ApplicationController
  expire_session_in 5.minutes, :after_expiration => :some_method

  def some_method
    flash[:notice] = "You have been logged out due to inactivity"
  end
end
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4 Responses to “Automatically Expiring Sessions in Rails”

  1. Noah Stern Says:
    July 18th, 2007 at 02:56 PM

    Thanks Dave, we’re giving this a go in our website.

  2. chan huai Says:
    December 29th, 2007 at 02:29 AM

    hi i tried the after_expiration to run some method after expiration but somehow the method was not run. also what if i use this in controller that has beforefilter :loginrequired? since the afterexpiration method was not run, when the session reset and if i click on any pages that required login, i’ll get nil class object for my @currentuser variable.

  3. Muhammad Hassan Says:
    April 24th, 2008 at 12:26 PM

    Thank you for giving this info, I have 2 questions: 1.What is the default session time of Rails (in case I did not use any plugins) 2.How to get user sesssion id?

    Thank you for your help.

    Muhammad Hassan http://www.badrit.com

  4. Fabiola Says:
    August 13th, 2008 at 08:28 PM

    Hey, the plugin is missing!!!

Sorry, comments are closed for this article.

Dave is the cofounder of Intridea and leads Intridea's product development efforts.

Before Intridea, Dave spent years at both AOL and IMAKE and received a Masters in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia.