How to store and retrieve information online whether the user in node js express and react?

Question

Express.js

I am making a website. react js + express js It is necessary to show whether the user is online now or who from the list is online when viewing a user or when listing users. How to organize it?

I only thought of opening a websocket connection with a static id (which does not change and depends on the user) and take the information window.addEventListener online, offline and transfer it over the socket when I get it to record in the user's table in mongo db all the time.

Or just make a put request every time the user clicks, passing the isOnline true field, which in 5 minutes will become false again if it is not extended.

Are there any elegant and long-established solutions? You can share a link to the article\library and how it is usually solved. Can it be done through redis? (I didn't use it)

Answer 1

As you wrote - websocket. Create a beforeunload event handler and send an appropriate message to the server. But there is a problem, if the user closes the browser, then this event will not fire. To do this, set a response time on the server, let's say 5 seconds, then after 5 seconds, if there is no response from the client, the necessary method can be called on the server to set the user offline status.