Spring Boot - persist session

In this article, we would like to show how in Spring Boot, store session in the file, preventing losing session when the server is restarted (logging-out user too).

Quick solution (put following line into application.properties file):

server.servlet.session.store-dir=/var/lib/path/to/my-application/sessions

Practical example

It is necessary to indicate store directory path in application.properties file:

...

server.servlet.session.persistent=true
server.servlet.session.store-dir=/var/lib/path/to/my-application/sessions

...

How does it work?

• Always on shutdown, Spring Boot Application will save sessions to a file inside:
  /var/lib/path/to/my-application/sessions directory.
• Always on startup, Spring Boot Application will load available sessions from a file inside:
  /var/lib/path/to/my-application/sessions directory.

Note: the presented solution was tested under Spring Boot 2.4 that was working with Tomcat 9.

See also

1. Spring Boot - store session ID in MySQL database