How to manage session expiration in Bubble

Bubble doesn’t give you a built‑in “session expiration” setting, but you can manage it by building your own logic: track the user’s last activity inside the app, and when they’ve been inactive for too long, log them out or redirect them. This is done using a custom field on the User, “Last activity”, plus a repeating frontend workflow that updates it, and a condition on page load that checks if the session should be expired.

How to Build Session Expiration in Bubble

You create your own session timer because Bubble does not expose its internal login timeout. The common pattern is: store a timestamp on the User every time they do something, keep updating it in the background, and when the difference between “now” and that timestamp is too large, force a logout.

• Create a date field on the User called “Last activity”.
• On every page, add a Do every 5 seconds workflow that updates “Current User’s Last activity = Current date/time”.
• On page load, add a workflow that checks if Current date/time − Current User’s Last activity is greater than your limit (for example 20 minutes).
• If expired, run Log the user out and navigate to the login page.

// In "Do every 5 seconds" workflow:
// Step: Make changes to current user
Last activity = Current date/time

For the check: in your page’s “When page is loaded” workflow, add a condition like “Only when Current date/time − Current User’s Last activity > 20 minutes”. Then log the user out. This works because Bubble reliably updates date fields and lets you compare dates directly in conditions.