Today we're going to be learning all about sessions and how they work!

• Clone this repository down to your local directory.
• Type in bundle install in your terminal
• Run shotgun and follow along in your browser.
• Follow along in the README
• As you go through each exercise, type in learn to ensure that your tests pass (you can quit shotgun, or run learn in a different terminal window)

The Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is, by definition, a stateless protocol. The reason why it's called a stateless protocol is because a server does not attach special meaning to a request, and consequently does not require the server to retain any information about a user or entity for the duration of a request.

So how does a web application maintain state for a user? It can do this via cookie-based sessions, where a cookie is stored on the client-side (in the browser) and used to warehouse data related to activity in the current user's session.

This is a simple lab that will go through the basic implementation of a session in Sinatra. Be sure to read the specs to see what's required of each step.

A session cookie is simply a text file that consists of key-value pairs. In a web application, a session cookie is represented by a hash that is called session. So, for example, if we have a key in our sessions hash that is called "happiness", and we set it equal to the number 3.14, it will look like this:

{
  'happiness' => 3.14
}

We can access this ID attribute via session[:happiness] or session['happiness'].

In our first exercise, we will navigate to the /first_exercise path. Please follow instructions for each step, and be sure to run rspec before implementing each step. Make each test pass before proceeding to the next step.

In our second exercise, we will navigate to the /second_exercise path. As in the previous lesson, be sure to run rspec before implementing each step. Make each test pass before proceeding to the next step.

• Primer on Cookie-Based Sessions

View Sinatra Sessions on Learn.co and start learning to code for free.