‘Has Secure Token’ in Rails

Rails is a framework written in Ruby used mainly for web development. I am trying here to give an insight about the “has secure token” which was introduced in Rails 5. In previous versions, secure token was not available, instead we had:

ActiveRecord::Base#has_secure_password method

“has_secure_token”, in Rails 5, specifies that an attribute of your model should be used to store a unique 24-character alphanumeric token. Tokens like this are often used in Rails applications for providing token-based API access or allowing one-time access for password reset actions.

How to add token into existing model ?

To add a secure token column to an existing model, use migration generator:

*rails g migration add_auth_token_to_users auth_token:token

This creates a migration to add a string column called auth_token which in turn adds a unique index on that column, as shown in the following code:

class AddAuthTokenToUsers < ActiveRecord::Migration
    def change
           add_column :users, :auth_token, :string
           add_index :users, :auth_token, unique: true     
    end 
end

How to add Secure Token in Model ?

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_secure_token :auth_token
end

The name of the model attribute defaults to token if no name for the column is specified. The actual token value is generated in a before_create handler, so the value is only available after you have successfully created an item. After that, the value does not subsequently change, as shown here:

user = User.new 
user.auth_token 
      # nil will be returned 
user.save 
user.auth_token 
      # it will return some token like cSlvzXl6kVvWUj4iNahElQ

Multiple Tokens:

Multiple token attributes can be specified in a model, simply by adding additional has_secure_token statements.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base 
   has_secure_token :auth_token 
   has_secure_token :password_reset_token 
end

Regenerating the Token:

To generate token and save it to the database, one can now use “regenerate_token” method to generate new token:

user.auth_token 
     # cSlvzXl6kVvWUj4iNahElQ 
user.regenerate_token 
     # xr4naoc77wYATGehnFb5Mg

Comment below for any further queries.

Have a Good Day !!