A lightweight, efficient, and secure HTTP session management library for Go applications.
SCS is a Go library for managing HTTP sessions in web applications. It handles server-side session storage, token communication via cookies or headers, and provides security features like token regeneration and timeouts. It solves the problem of securely managing user state across HTTP requests in Go servers.
Go developers building web applications that require user authentication, state persistence, or secure session management, particularly those using the standard net/http package or compatible frameworks.
Developers choose SCS for its OWASP-compliant security, extensive store support, performance advantages over alternatives, and clean integration with Go's context and middleware patterns without locking them into a specific framework.
HTTP Session Management for Go
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Supports 19+ backends including PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, and embedded options, offering flexibility for various production environments as detailed in the store configuration table.
Implements security best practices like session token regeneration, idle timeouts, and prevention of fixation attacks, following OWASP guidelines as highlighted in the basic use and security sections.
Designed to be smaller, faster, and use less memory than alternatives like gorilla/sessions, with benchmarks mentioned in the features and project philosophy.
Provides type-safe helpers (GetString, GetInt) and integrates seamlessly with Go's standard net/http package and middleware patterns, shown in the basic use and working with session data examples.
Admitted compatibility issues with popular frameworks like Echo and Fiber that don't propagate context, requiring extra packages or workarounds as noted in the compatibility section.
Requires manual registration of custom types with encoding/gob, which can be tedious and error-prone for projects with diverse data structures, as explained in the working with session data section.
Some advanced functionalities like flushing and hijacking responses only work with Go >=1.20 due to reliance on http.NewResponseController, limiting older projects as mentioned in the multiple writes section.