Generating Guids in Ruby

Question

I have problem that is really easily solved with Guids.

In particular, for a password reset workflow, I would like to send a Guid token to a user\'s email and have

Answer 1

Google yields the following Ruby library:

http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/ruby-guid/

Also, over at http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/99262 they say you can install a gem (execute gem uuid on the command line to install it) and then do

gem 'uuid'
puts UUID.new

in your code to see a new UUID.

(Hint: I Googled for guid ruby)

Answer 2

To create a proper, mysql, varchar 32 GUID

SecureRandom.uuid.gsub('-','').upcase

Answer 3

Small update to Simone Carletti answer:

SecureRandom.base64(8).gsub("/","_").gsub(/=+$/,"")

=> "AEWQyovNFo0"

can be replaced with:

SecureRandom.urlsafe_base64(8)

Answer 4

How to create small, unique tokens in Ruby

>> require 'digest'
=> []
>> Digest::SHA1.hexdigest("some-random-string")[8..16]
=> "2ebe5597f"

>> SecureRandom.base64(8).gsub("/","_").gsub(/=+$/,"")
=> "AEWQyovNFo0" 

>> rand(36**8).to_s(36)
=> "uur0cj2h"