Secure, persistent server side variables?

help
1

Besides the obvious (using MongoDB), how do I go about storing data that is never accessible by the client? It’s okay if it’s destroyed when the server shuts down.

2

Is there anything wrong with this approach:

server/file.js

secureVar = '';

Meteor.methods({
  refreshToken: function () {
    secureVar = getSecureThing();
  ...
});

And so then secureVar could be accessed globally, but not on the client?

3

What’s the reason to not use the obvious, a collection, in this case?

4

The desire to keep the number of moving parts as minimal as possible. Seems overkill to engage MongoDB just to store a single variable server-side only.

I tried the above technique of having a global variable, seems to work.

5

@captsaltyjack thats perfectly acceptable unless it deals with application state. If it deals with state then you will likely run into scaling issues.

6

@copleykj Makes sense. Then MongoDB would be the proper place to store persistent application states for large scale apps. (this is a small scale)

7 
//server
//create global session object
Sessions = {}
//on each connection to the server
Meteor.onConnection(function(connection){
	//instantiate a dictionary labeled with the connection's unique id.
	Sessions[connection.id] = {clientData:{}, time: Date.now()};
	connection.onClose(function(){
		//forget the client when they leave
		delete Sessions[connection.id]
	})
})
5 Likes
8

How about using server-side localStorage? localStorage is even non-volatile (it will persist after power loss) because the data is continually written to disk as a SQLite-style database file. You can even run basic SQL queries against this data if you like.