Summary
As a learning task, I've created a basic wiki with ASP.Net Core Razor Pages. So far, the experience has been great. One issue I had however is that my authentication (using CookieAuthentication) was timing out way too early and caused issues when I would be in the article editor. My observation was that this timeout seemed to occur within 15-20 minutes. According to the examples I found I thought I had set all of the appropriate timeout's but in fact I missed one and I wanted to share each of the properties I had to set to increase this timeout (there is a cookie timeout, a ticket timeout inside the cookie and then a timeout that is specified inside the SignInAsync method). I had originally thought that the Azure app service I was running it in was resetting but after inspection I realized that wasn't the case (I did however research and implement DataProtection as part of my debugging which additionally will protect the Session's in the site from app pool recycles).
For a primer on manually using CookieAuthentication visit here: Use cookie authentication without ASP.NET Core Identity
Finally... here are the lines of code where I set timeout's to alleviate this issue.
Startup.cs => public void ConfigureServices
services.AddAuthentication(CookieAuthenticationDefaults.AuthenticationScheme)
.AddCookie(CookieAuthenticationDefaults.AuthenticationScheme, o =>
{
o.LoginPath = new PathString("/Login");
o.AccessDeniedPath = new PathString("/Unauthorized");
o.SlidingExpiration = true;
o.ExpireTimeSpan = TimeSpan.FromMinutes(60);
o.Cookie.Expiration = TimeSpan.FromMinutes(60);
});
Login.cshtml.cs => This is the method where the user initiates the sign in
HttpContext.SignInAsync(
CookieAuthenticationDefaults.AuthenticationScheme,
userPrincipal,
new AuthenticationProperties
{
ExpiresUtc = DateTime.UtcNow.AddMinutes(60),
IsPersistent = true,
AllowRefresh = true
});