Yan Pritzker photographer, entrepreneur, software engineer, musician, skier

Debugging technique for Rails: decode the session cookie

Posted 16 July 2008 @ 2pm | Tagged RubyOnRails

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Ever try to debug a problem and needed to see what was inside the user’s session at the time? If you’re using the cookie session store (Rails 2.x), you can now use this tool to take a look:

http://pastie.org/235017

Simply invoke it like this:

DebugTools.show_session("your long session id goes in here")

The code deals with linebreaks automatically, so don’t worry about formatting the string, just cut, paste and enjoy.

Update: this seems like the correct way these days: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1941499/given-the-session-key-and-secret-how-can-we-decrypt-rails-cookies