PingFederate Server

Extending the lifetime of the PingFederate cookie

PingFederate identifies sessions by their respective PingFederate cookies. You can manually extend the lifetime of these cookies.

About this task

Some adapters, such as the HTML Form Adapter, also utilize the PingFederate cookie to manage their adapter-sessions. The PingFederate cookie is a session cookie by default. You can extend the lifetime of the PingFederate cookie by making it a persistent cookie. Unlike session cookies, persistent cookies are saved to disk, enabling the browser to reuse them when restarted.

Alternatively, you can configure PingFederate to store authentication sessions externally and leverage them as users request protected resources after restarting their browsers. For more information, see Sessions.

Steps

  1. Edit the session-cookie-config.xml file, located in the <pf_install>/pingfederate/server/default/data/config-store directory.

  2. Modify the cookie-max-age value.

    The default value, -1, makes the PingFederate cookie a session cookie. A positive integer defines the age of the persistent cookie in seconds.

  3. Save the change.

  4. Restart PingFederate.

    For a clustered PingFederate environment, perform these steps on the console node, and then click Replicate Configuration on System → Server → Cluster Management.