How to I dynamically set the expiry time for a cookie-based session in Rails

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

Answer 1

Ideally, you'd want to add something like this to environment.rb:

session :session_expires => 1.day.from_now

But that won't work because the code is only run once when the APP is started and thus the next day all your sessions are being created with an expiration in the past.

I usually set the session_expires to some time far in the future (6 months). Then manually set and check a session[:expires] date in a before_filter on my application controller and reset the session when that date has passed.

This makes it VERY easy to add a 'Keep me logged in for ___' option when signing in, you just set session[:expires] = Time.now + ___