If REST applications are supposed to be stateless, how do you manage sessions?

The fundamental explanation is:

No client session state on the server.

By stateless it means that the server does not store any state about the client session on the server side.

The client session is stored on the client. The server is stateless means that every server can service any client at any time, there is no session affinity or sticky sessions. The relevant session information is stored on the client and passed to the server as needed.

That does not preclude other services that the web server talks to from maintaining state about business objects such as shopping carts, just not about the client's current application/session state.

The client's application state should never be stored on the server, but passed around from the client to every place that needs it.

That is where the ST in REST comes from, State Transfer. You transfer the state around instead of having the server store it. This is the only way to scale to millions of concurrent users. If for no other reason than because millions of sessions is millions of sessions.

The load of session management is amortized across all the clients, the clients store their session state and the servers can service many orders of magnitude or more clients in a stateless fashion.

Even for a service that you think will only need in the 10's of thousands of concurrent users, you still should make your service stateless. Tens of thousands is still tens of thousands and there will be time and space cost associated with it.

Stateless is how the HTTP protocol and the web in general was designed to operate and is an overall simpler implementation and you have a single code path instead of a bunch of server side logic to maintain a bunch of session state.

There are some very basic implementation principles:

These are principles not implementations, how you meet these principles may vary.

In summary, the five key principles are:

  1. Give every “thing” an ID
  2. Link things together
  3. Use standard methods
  4. Resources with multiple representations
  5. Communicate statelessly

There is nothing about authentication or authorization in the REST dissertation.

Because there is nothing different from authenticating a request that is RESTful from one that is not. Authentication is irrelevant to the RESTful discussion.

Explaining how to create a stateless application for your particular requirements, is too-broad for StackOverflow.

Implementing Authentication and Authorization as it pertains to REST is even more so too-broad and various approaches to implementations are explained in great detail on the internet in general.

Comments asking for help/info on this will/should just be flagged as No Longer Needed.


You are absolutely right, supporting completely stateless interactions with the server does put an additional burden on the client. However, if you consider scaling an application, the computation power of the clients is directly proportional to the number of clients. Therefore scaling to high numbers of clients is much more feasible.

As soon as you put a tiny bit of responsibility on the server to manage some information related to a specific client's interactions, that burden can quickly grow to consume the server.

It's a trade off.


Are they just saying don't use session/application level data store???

No. They aren't saying that in a trivial way.

They're saying do not define a "session". Don't login. Don't logout. Provide credentials with the request. Each request stands alone.

You still have data stores. You still have authentication and authorization. You just don't waste time establishing sessions and maintaining session state.

The point is that each request (a) stands completely alone and (b) can be trivially farmed out to a giant parallel server farm without any actual work. Apache or Squid can pass RESTful requests around blindly and successfully.

What if I had a queue of messages, and my user wanted to read the messages, but as he read them, wanted to block certain senders messages coming through for the duration of his session?

If the user wants a filter, then simply provide the filter on each request.

Wouldn't it make sense to ... have the server only send messages (or message ID's) that were not blocked by the user?

Yes. Provide the filter in the RESTful URI request.

Do I really have to send the entire list of message senders to block each time I request the new message list?

Yes. How big can this "list of message senders to block" be? A short list of PK's?

A GET request can be very large. If necessary, you can try a POST request even though it sounds like a kind of query.


Statelessness means that every HTTP request happens in complete isolation. When the client makes an HTTP request, it includes all the information necessary for the server to fulfill that request. The server never relies on information from previous requests. If that information was important, the client would have to send it again in subsequent request. Statelessness also brings new features. It’s easier to distribute a stateless application across load-balanced servers. A stateless application is also easy to cache.

There are actually two kinds of state. Application State that lives on the client and Resource State that lives on the server.

A web service only needs to care about your application state when you’re actually making a request. The rest of the time, it doesn’t even know you exist. This means that whenever a client makes a request, it must include all the application states the server will need to process it.

Resource state is the same for every client, and its proper place is on the server. When you upload a picture to a server, you create a new resource: the new picture has its own URI and can be the target of future requests. You can fetch, modify, and delete this resource through HTTP.

Hope this helps differentiate what statelessness and various states mean.