Passport.js does not work with cookieSession (Express.js)

I’m using Passport to log in with Facebook or Twitter into my service. Since MemoryStore is not intended for production and I’m not going to store much information into the session, I wanted to use cookieSession, but it doesn’t work:

app.use(express.bodyParser());
app.use(express.methodOverride());
app.use(express.cookieParser());
app.use(express.cookieSession({ secret: 'keyboard cat', cookie: {maxAge: 60 * 60} }));
app.use(passport.initialize());
app.use(passport.session());
app.use(app.router);

It works as expected if I repace cookieSession() with session():

app.use(express.session({ secret: 'keyboard cat' }));

[eneko89]

SOLVED! 😄

It was my fault, nothing to do with passport. I was provisionally serializing full facebook profile into the session (like you did in the passport-facebook project’s example), without taking into account that it doesn’t fit into a cookie! That’s why it was working using the default MemoryStore and failing with cookieSession. It works as expected if you serialize less information.

Hope it helps, @mlehtinen 😃.

[mitchellporter]

This still seems to be an issue. Unfortunately I don’t have time to isolate and test right now but I don’t think this is as simple as trying to write too much data to the cookie. I keep running into an issue where it wants to deserialize the user despite the fact that the user doesn’t exist yet. Replacing cookie-session with express-session fixes the problem.

Will hopefully have more time to figure out what’s wrong soon and then I’ll report back.