NGINX Cookbook

Cookie-based tracking

1. To configure using cookie-based sticky sessions, we can use the following configuration:

      upstream stickyapp { 
          server 127.0.0.1:8080; 
          server 127.0.0.1:8081; 
          server 127.0.0.1:8082; 
          sticky cookie cookbook expires=1h; 
      } 
 
      server { 
          listen       80; 
          server_name  session.nginxcookbook.com; 
          access_log  /var/log/nginx/sessiontest-access.log  combined; 
          location / { 
              proxy_pass http://stickyapp; 
          } 
      }

2. Upon the first request, NGINX will set a cookie to track all subsequent sessions. You can confirm the cookie by viewing received HTTP headers using a tool such as HTTPie:

      http http://session.nginxcookbook.com/

This output should show the server headers, which will contain a Set-Cookie header:

      HTTP/1.1 200 OK
      Connection: keep-alive
      Content-Length: ...