socket.io-sticky-headers

Use custom header to maintain sticky sessions with socket.io

Problem

For cluster of socket.io servers Socket.io connections made by the client requires a handshake process that involves sending several XHR requests. If any of those requests fail to connect to the same instance the handshake will fail and socket.io will be in a reconnect loop (failing with 401 errors).

Sticky sessions are need to successfully connect to a cluster of socket.io servers. Usually this can be managed with a Cookie. However browsers such as Safari has very strict third party cookie rules which could prevent this from working. An example could be a chat client placed on a customers site.

This module patches the engine.io XHR polling to capture a custom http header response of your choosing. Any future requests made will use the same http header. Future requests will update the header if that header ever changed.

Install

npm install socket.io-sticky-headers --save

Usage

Socket.io

require('socket.io-sticky-headers')(require('socket.io-client/node_modules/engine.io-client/lib/transports/polling-xhr'), 'My-Session-Id')

Engine.io

require('socket.io-sticky-headers')(require('engine.io-client/lib/transports/polling-xhr'), 'My-Session-Id')

Pass true as the third argument if you wish to send the header as query param instead (which maybe more desirable for CORS reasons). You will need to provide a socket as shown below:

const stickyHeader = require('socket.io-sticky-headers')
stickyHeader(require('engine.io-client/lib/transports/polling-xhr'), 'My-Session-Id', true)
 
var io = require('socket.io-client')
 
var socket = io('http://localhost:3000', {
  reconnection: false,
  'force new connection': true
})
 
stickyHeader.setSocket(socket)