Integrating Spring Session with Redis for Distributed Session Sharing in Spring Boot

In a traditional single‑service architecture a single server holds the session, so sharing is not an issue, but in distributed or clustered projects session sharing becomes essential.

When a client request passes through Nginx and reaches Tomcat A, the session data is stored there; a subsequent request may be routed to Tomcat B, which cannot find the previous session data. The common solution is to store shared session data in a central store, typically Redis.

All Tomcat instances write session data to Redis and read from Redis, enabling consistent session access across services. Implementing this manually with Redis client libraries is possible but labor‑intensive.

Spring Session simplifies the task by providing a proxy filter that intercepts all session operations and automatically synchronizes them with Redis, making session handling transparent to developers.

Developers can configure Spring Session once and then use the session exactly as they would a regular HTTP session.

Practical Demo

The author presents a short video tutorial showing how to quickly integrate Spring Session into a Spring Boot project (recorded with Spring Boot 2.1.6).

A written version of the tutorial is also available via the provided link.

Spring Boot One Dependency for Session Sharing

The related code samples have been uploaded to GitHub: https://github.com/lenve/javaboy-code-samples .

Readers are encouraged to leave comments, share the video if helpful, and click “In view” in the lower right corner.