Setting Grails session timeout in production

Grails 3 was a great update to the framework and kept it up-to-date with modern requirement in web development. Modularization, profiles, revamped build system and configuration were all great changes that made working with grails more productive and fun again.

I quite like the choice of YAML for the configuration settings because you can easily describe sections and hierarchies without much syntactic noise.

Unfortunately, there are some caveats. One of them went live and caused a (minor) irritation for our customer:

The session timeout was back to the 30 minutes default and not prolongued to the one hour we all agreed upon some years (!) ago.

Investigating the cause

Our configuration in application.yml was correctly set to the desired one hour timeout and in development everything was working as expected. But the thing is that the setting server.session.timeout is only applied to the embedded tomcat. If your application is deployed to a standalone servlet container this setting is ignored. Unfortunately it is far from obvious which settings in application.yml are used in what situation.

In the case of a standalone servlet container you would just edit your applications web.xml and the container would use the setting there. While this would work, it is not very nice because you have two locations for one setting. In software development we call that duplication . What makes things worse is, that there is no web.xml in our case! So what now?

The solution

We have two problems here

1. Providing the functionality our customer desires
2. Removing the code duplication so that development and production work the same way

Our solution is to apply the setting from application.yml to the HTTP-Session of the request using an interceptor:

class SessionInterceptor {
    int order = -1000

    SessionInterceptor() {
        matchAll()
    }

    boolean before() {
        int sessionTimeout = grailsApplication.config.getProperty('server.session.timeout') as int
        log.info("Configured session timeout is: ${sessionTimeout}")
        request.session?.setMaxInactiveInterval(sessionTimeout)
        true
    }
}

That way we use a single source of truth, namely the configuration in application.yml , both in development and production.