dynamodb-session-store

DynamoDB is a fully managed key/value store offered by AWS that promisses to be highly scalable and fast.

Although, those that already tried to deal with this NoSQL database, know that the query structure can be very annoying with the so-called, strong-typed JSON.

It would be nice to use DynamoDB to store your node.js sessions without having to construct those queries by hand... Fear no more! This module will make your life easier.

Based on the EnergyDB adapter (which simplifies the document handling when dealing with DynamoDB), the job to save and retrieve sessions objects is made easy here, and offered as a standard express-session storage.

Please note that this module still BETA!

Instalation

If you are reading you know how to install a npm module. Just put it in your dependencies list or install it globally if you are one of those people.

How to use it

When creating the middleware for your express application, do as usual for most of the session storages out there:

var session = require('express-session');
var DynamoDBStore = require('dynamodb-session-store')(session);
 
var options = {
  tableName: 'Ultraviolet-Sessions'
};

app.use(session({
  store: new DynamoDBStore(options),
  secret: 'There... are... four... lights!!!'
}));

The parameter options is an object that contains the settings to store instance. It can contain anything an instance of EnergyDB or DynamoDB expects as settings. It's mandatory to provide a tableName.

Some particular useful settings are the AWS credentials related values. In order to connect to your table in DynamoDB, you need to provide the access key, the secret key and the region where is table is located. It's highly recommended that you use the same region where your application is running, otherwise you will experience big latency.

By default, the DynamoDBStore will use consistent reads by default. You can override this setting in the options, setting consistentRead to false.

Here is an example of how the options object may look like:

var options = {
  tableName: 'THX-1138-Table',
  consistentRead: false,
  accessKeyId: 'AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA',
  secretAccessKey: 'SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS',
  region: 'fi-narnia-1'
};

If you don't provide accessKeyId, secretAccessKey and/or region, we are going to try to find these values among the enviromental variable, more precisely AWS_ACCESS_KEY, AWS_SECRET_KEY and AWS_REGION.

Because we are EnergyDB, you don't have to care about converting the objects back and forth from js to dynamo-strong-typed-json. DynamoDoc is used internally to make this convertion for you.

As usual, I suggest you to take a look on the code and the tests, if you want to do something more complex.

Unit tests

We try to keep everything very simple and to cover things with tests (most of the times writing them first). Limitations of the EnergyDB, about some error handling, will reflect in this module too.

Contributing

Fork the repo, create a branch, do awesome additions and submit a pull-request. Only PR's with tests will be considered.

Releases

• 0.0.2

  • Changes the name of the package to 'dynamodb-session-store'

• 0.0.1

  • Initial release
  • support to destroy, get and set operations