Session management

The SDK may be used to check whether a user has a cached session, view the current session, refresh the session, and revoke the session. To authenticate a session on your backend, you must use either the Stytch API or a Stytch Backend SDK.

Methods

Get session

The SDK provides the session.getSync method to retrieve the current session. The session.onChange method can be used to listen to session changes.

If logged in, the session.getSync method returns the cached session object. Otherwise it returns null.

The session.getInfo method is similar to session.getSync, but it returns an object containing the session object and a fromCache boolean. If fromCache is true, the session object is from the cache and a state refresh is in progress.

The session.onChange method takes in a callback that gets called whenever the user object changes. It returns an unsubscribe method for you to call when you no longer want to listen for such changes.

The @stytch/react-native library also provides the useStytchSession hook that implements these methods for you to easily access the session and listen for changes.

import React, { useEffect } from 'react';
import { useStytchSession } from '@stytch/react-native';

export const withMfaRequired = (Component) => (props) => {
  const { stytchSession } = useStytchSession();

  useEffect(() => {
    if (!stytchSession || stytchSession.authentication_factors.length < 2) {
      window.location.replace('/home');
    }
  }, [stytchSession]);

  if (!stytchSession || stytchSession.authentication_factors.length) {
    return null;
  }

  return <Component {...props} />;
};

Refresh session

Wraps Stytch's authenticate Session endpoint and validates that the session issued to the user is still valid. The SDK will invoke this method automatically in the background. You probably won't need to call this method directly. It's recommended to use session.getSync and session.onChange instead.

Method parameters

Configuration object

Additional configuration.

session_duration_minutes int
import React, { useEffect } from 'react';
import { useStytch } from '@stytch/react-native';

export const RefreshSession = () => {
  const stytchClient = useStytch();

  useEffect(() => {
    const refresh = () => {
      if (stytchClient.session.getSync()) {
        stytchClient.session.authenticate({
          session_duration_minutes: 60,
        });
      }
    };
    // Refresh session every 50 minutes
    let interval = setInterval(refresh, 3000000);
    return () => clearInterval(interval);
  }, [stytchClient]);

  return null;
};

RESPONSE

200
{
    "status_code": 200,
    "request_id": "request-id-test-b05c992f-ebdc-489d-a754-c7e70ba13141",
    "session": {
      "attributes": {
        "ip_address": "203.0.113.1",
        "user_agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.103 Safari/537.36"
      },
      "authentication_factors": [
        {
          "delivery_method": "email",
          "email_factor": {
            "email_address": "sandbox@stytch.com",
            "email_id": "email-test-81bf03a8-86e1-4d95-bd44-bb3495224953"
          },
          "last_authenticated_at": "2021-08-09T07:41:52Z",
          "created_at": "2021-08-09T07:41:52Z",
          "updated_at": "2021-08-09T07:41:52Z",
          "type": "magic_link"
        }
      ],
      "custom_claims": {
        "claim1": "value1",
        "claim2": "value2",
      },
      "expires_at": "2021-08-10T07:41:52Z",
      "last_accessed_at": "2021-08-09T07:41:52Z",
      "session_id": "session-test-fe6c042b-6286-479f-8a4f-b046a6c46509",
      "started_at": "2021-08-09T07:41:52Z",
      "user_id": "user-test-16d9ba61-97a1-4ba4-9720-b03761dc50c6",
    },
    "session_jwt": "example_jwt"
    "session_token": "mZAYn5aLEqKUlZ_Ad9U_fWr38GaAQ1oFAhT8ds245v7Q"
    "user": {...},
  }

Get tokens

Returns the session_token and session_jwt for the active session. Otherwise retuns null.

import React, { useEffect } from 'react';
import { useStytch, useStytchSession } from '@stytch/react-native';

export const SendSessionTokensToBackend = () => {
  const stytchClient = useStytch();
  const { session } = useStytchSession();

  // this will update the sessionTokens everytime the session updates (on login, session refresh, MFA, etc)
  const sessionTokens = useMemo(() => {
    return stytchClient.session.getTokens();
  }, [session]);

  // This useEffect block will trigger anytime the sessionTokens change
  useEffect(() => {
    if (!!sessionTokens) {
      console.log('session token', tokens.session_token);
      console.log('session jwt', tokens.session_jwt);
      // Do something with tokens
    }
  }, [sessionTokens]);

  return null;
};

Update session

Update a user's session tokens to hydrate a front-end session from the backend. For example, if you log your users in with one of our backend SDKs, you can pass the resulting session_token and session_jwt to this method to prime the frontend SDK with a valid set of tokens. You must then make an authenticate call to authenticate the session tokens and retrieve the user's current session.

import React, { useCallback, useEffect } from 'react';
import { useStytch, useStytchUser } from '@stytch/react-native';

export const App = () => {
  const stytchClient = useStytch();
  const { user } = useStytchUser();

  useEffect(() => {
    if (user) {
      // redirect to logged in experience
    }
  }, [user]);

  const authenticate = useCallback(() => {
    stytchClient.session.updateSession({
      session_token: 'a session token from your backend',
      session_jwt: 'a session JWT from your backend',
    });

    stytchClient.session.authenticate({ session_duration_minutes: 60 });
  }, [stytchClient]);

  return <button onClick={authenticate}>Hydrate session</button>;
};