Persistent login to OpenWRT luci

Sometimes, if you are logging in multiple times per day, the default 1 hour session time tied to a browser tab/window might be a bit annoying.

To increase the session time to for example 1 month 24 days¹, you need to do

uci set luci.sauth.sessiontime=2147483
uci commit

But it’s still set as a session cookie, to fix that, you need to modify /usr/lib/lua/luci/dispatcher.lua and change the line which begins with http.header("Set-Cookie",. You need to insert Max-Age= to make it a persistent cookie. Like so

http.header("Set-Cookie", 'sysauth=%s; Max-Age=2629746; path=%s; SameSite=Strict; HttpOnly%s' %{

Then you need to clear the luci-modulecache or reboot

rm -rf /tmp/luci-modulecache/

There, if you re-login on to luci you should now have a persistent cookie which will persist for one month. To remove it, press the logout.