Set start date and expiration date for Rails cookies

Question

How do I set a Rails cookie to start and/or expire at a certain date?

Answer 1

your question might be related to this question: How to I dynamically set the expiry time for a cookie-based session in Rails

one of the comments points to Deprecating SlideSessions:

"..If you need to set expiration period for sessions through all controllers in your application, simply add the following option to your config/intializers/session_store.rb file:

:expire_after => 60.minutes

If you need to set different expiration time in different controllers or actions, use the following code in action or some before_filter:

request.session_options = request.session_options.dup
request.session_options[:expire_after]= 5.minutes
request.session_options.freeze

Duplication of the hash is needed only because it is already frozen at that point, even though modification of at least :expire_after is possible and works flawlessly..."

I hope that helps. :)

Answer 2

Excerpts from Rails 5 documentation:

Cookies are read and written through ActionController#cookies.

The cookies being read are the ones received along with the request, the cookies being written will be sent out with the response. Reading a cookie does not get the cookie object itself back, just the value it holds.

Examples of writing:

# Sets a simple session cookie.
# This cookie will be deleted when the user's browser is closed.
cookies[:user_name] = "david"

# Sets a cookie that expires in 1 hour.
cookies[:login] = { value: "XJ-122", expires: 1.hour }

# Sets a cookie that expires at a specific time.
cookies[:login] = { value: "XJ-122", expires: Time.utc(2020, 10, 15, 5) }

# Sets a "permanent" cookie (which expires in 20 years from now).
cookies.permanent[:login] = "XJ-122"

[...]

The option symbols for setting cookies are:

• :expires - The time at which this cookie expires, as a Time or ActiveSupport::Duration object.

[...]

Answer 3

It's worth noting that as of right now it is impossible to set a start time for a cookie. A cookie set is always active immediately.