Hono Sessions Middleware

Use cookie-based sessions with the Hono framework.

Supported runtimes

Hono Sessions is currently tested on these runtimes:

• Deno
• Cloudflare Workers
• Cloudflare Pages
• Bun
• Node (v20+)

Other runtimes may work, but are untested. In addition to Hono's requirements, the Web Crypto API is required for this library.

🛠️ Features

• Flash messages — data that is deleted once it's read (one-off error messages, etc.)
• Built-in Memory and Cookie storage drivers, as well as community-supported drivers and the ability to create your own storage driver
• Encrypted cookies thanks to iron-webcrypto
• Session expiration after inactivity
• Session key rotation*
• Strong typing for session variables

*It is not necessary to rotate CookieStore sessions because of how a pure cookie session works (no server-side state). Therefore, using session key rotation will have no effect while using CookieStore.

Installation and Usage

Deno

Simply include the package from JSR or NPM

// JSR
import { sessionMiddleware } from 'jsr:@jcs224/hono-sessions'

// NPM
import { sessionMiddleware } from 'npm:hono-sessions'

You can also use deno add and not need the jsr: specifier.

Node, Bun, Cloudflare Workers, etc.

Install the NPM package

npm install hono-sessions

Examples

Deno

import { Hono } from 'npm:hono'
import { 
  Session,
  sessionMiddleware, 
  CookieStore 
} from 'jsr:@jcs224/hono-sessions'

// Add types to your session data (optional)
type SessionDataTypes = {
  'counter': number
}

// Set up your Hono instance, using your types
const app = new Hono<{
  Variables: {
    session: Session<SessionDataTypes>,
    session_key_rotation: boolean
  }
}>()

const store = new CookieStore()

app.use('*', sessionMiddleware({
  store,
  encryptionKey: 'password_at_least_32_characters_long', // Required for CookieStore, recommended for others.
  // You can also supply a function instead of a plain string
  // encryptionKey: () => 'function_that_returns_a_long_string'
  expireAfterSeconds: 900, // Expire session after 15 minutes of inactivity
  autoExtendExpiration: true, // Extend the session expiration time automatically. Defaults to true
  cookieOptions: {
    sameSite: 'Lax', // Recommended for basic CSRF protection in modern browsers
    path: '/', // Required for this library to work properly
    httpOnly: true, // Recommended to avoid XSS attacks
  },
}))

app.get('/', async (c, next) => {
  const session = c.get('session')

  session.set('counter', (session.get('counter') || 0) + 1)

  return c.html(`<h1>You have visited this page ${ session.get('counter') } times</h1>`)
})

app.get('/read', (c) => {
  const session = c.get('session')
  session.touch() // Update the session expiration time
  return c.json({
    counter: session.get('counter')
  })
})

Deno.serve(app.fetch)

Bun

import { Hono } from 'hono'
import { sessionMiddleware, CookieStore, Session } from 'hono-sessions'

// Same as Deno, however instead of:
// Deno.serve(app.fetch)
// use:

export default {
  port: 3000,
  fetch: app.fetch
}

Using Bun's SQLite storage driver

This will automatically create a database.sqlite file and a sessions table in that sqlite database.

import { Hono } from 'hono'
import { sessionMiddleware } from 'hono-sessions'
import { BunSqliteStore } from 'hono-sessions/bun-sqlite-store'
import { Database } from 'bun:sqlite'

const app = new Hono()

const db = new Database('./database.sqlite')
const store = new BunSqliteStore(db)

app.use('*', sessionMiddleware({
  store,
  // ... other session options
}))

// Other app code

export default {
  port: 3000,
  fetch: app.fetch
}

Cloudflare Workers / Pages

import { Hono } from 'hono'
import { sessionMiddleware, CookieStore, Session } from 'hono-sessions'

// Same as Deno, however instead of:
// Deno.serve(app.fetch)
// use:

export default app

API

The session object returned from c.get('session') has several methods:

• get(id: string): Fetch the value from a given key.

• set(id: string, value: any): Set a value that can be serialized with JSON.stringify()

• flash(id: string, value: any): Similar to set(), however the value is deleted immediately after it's read once. Best used for one-off alerts or form validation messages (login failure, etc.)

• forget(id: string): Remove a value from the session based on its key

Contributing

This package is built Deno-first, so you'll need to have Deno installed in your development environment. See their website for installation instructions specific to your platform.

Once Deno is installed, there is a test server you can run a basic web server to check your changes:

deno run --allow-net --watch test/deno/server_deno.ts

There's also a Playwright test suite. By default, it is set up to run a Deno server with the MemoryStore driver. In Github actions, it runs through a series of runtimes and storage drivers when a pull request is made.

cd playwright
npm install
npx playwright test