django-session-timeout

Add timestamp to sessions to expire them after a given period of inactivity.

Installation

pip install django-session-timeout

Usage

Update your settings to add the SessionTimeoutMiddleware:

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = [
    # ...
    'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
    'django_session_timeout.middleware.SessionTimeoutMiddleware',
    # ...
]

To enable the 'expiresessions' admin command, also add this to INSTALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    # ...
    'django_session_timeout.apps.SessionTimeoutConfig',
    # ...
]

SESSION_EXPIRE_AT_BROWSER_CLOSE should be set to True, so that sessions are closed when the user closes their browser.

Also add SESSION_EXPIRE_SECONDS to define when sessions should expire after going idle:

SESSION_EXPIRE_SECONDS = 3600  # 1 hour

By default, the session will expire X seconds after the start of the session. To expire the session X seconds after the last activity, use the following setting:

SESSION_EXPIRE_AFTER_LAST_ACTIVITY = True

By default, last activity will be updated on every request. You can avoid some overhead, at the cost of some precision in expiry time, by only updating it if some time has passed since the last update. To so so, set a grace period as with this setting:

SESSION_EXPIRE_AFTER_LAST_ACTIVITY_GRACE_PERIOD = 60 # update at most once per minute

If you want to implement a friendly warning to users before their session is forcibly timed out, you can define limits for when such a warning should show up, and when the user should be logged out if they do not respond to it. Add these variables to your settings:

SESSION_IDLE_SECONDS = 600     # Show warning after 10 minutes
SESSION_TIMEOUT_SECONDS = 1200 # After 10 more minutes, user will be logged off

This middleware does not implement the warning, but does provide a couple of useful endpoints that you might need: a "status" view that returns information abot the current session, without itself being counted as activity that should reset the idle time; and a "keepalive" URL that marks the session as active again.