PingFederate identifies sessions by their respective PF cookies. Some adapters, such as the HTML Form Adapter, also utilize the PF cookie to manage their adapter-sessions.

By default, the PF cookie is a session cookie. You may extend the lifetime of the PF cookie by making it a persistent cookie. Unlike session cookies, persistent cookies are saved to disk, enabling the browser to reuse them when restarted.

Tip:

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.

  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 PF 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 the System > Cluster Management screen. It is not necessary to restart PingFederate on any running engine node.