Set Express response headers before redirect

Question

I'm implementing a site login that takes in an email/password combo, retrieves an API token, and returns it to the user to get stored (encrypted) in localStorage.

Currently, on successful POSTing to /login, the app redirects the user to the index page, with the token attached as a query, like so (as suggested here):

login.post('/', function(req, res) {
    ...checking password...

    Auth.getToken(user, function(err, token) {
        res.redirect('/?token=' + token);
    });
});

This works fine, but I'd prefer to keep my URLs as clean as possible and set the token as a header instead:

login.post('/', function(req, res) {
    ...checking password...

    Auth.getToken(user, function(err, token) {
        res.set('x-access-token', token);
        console.log(res._headers);
            // --> {'x-powered-by': 'Express', 'x-access-token': <token>}
        res.redirect('/');
    });
});

console.log-ing res._headers shows that the headers are set as expected, but when I log req.headers on the request to the index page, it's not showing up:

{ host: 'localhost:3000',
  connection: 'keep-alive',
 'cache-control': 'max-age=0',
 accept: 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8',
 'upgrade-insecure-requests': '1',
 'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/44.0.2403.157 Safari/537.36',
 referer: 'http://localhost:3000/login',
 'accept-encoding': 'gzip, deflate, sdch',
 'accept-language': 'en-US,en;q=0.8',
 cookie: 'ifusr=crwj; _ga=GA1.1.1933420201.1409901705',
 'if-none-match': '"1195161647"' }

Any suggestions appreciated!

Solution

Setting headers wouldn't work here because a redirect will execute a new http request, you can use express-session to store the auth token and fetch it when you need it

req.session.accessToken = token

Comments

[wkd]

So if I don't want to use sessions, the query string is pretty much my only option for passing context to a new request?

[Julián Duque]

You can with res.render('index') but not sure if you need to trigger something in the route, if you need that yes, a querystring is your only option

[ndtreviv]

Extra upvotes for if you show how to put the accessToken in the session...?

[lazaruslarue]

Double extra upboats for you to show how to do it in res.render('index') @JuliánDuque