Has secure token in rails 5

Today I gona discuss about the ActiveRecord::Base#has_secure_password method, in rails 5 it became has_secure_token, it specifies that an attribute of your model should be used to store a unique 24-character alphanumeric token. Tokens such as this are often used in Rails applications for providing token-based API access or allowing one-time access for password reset actions. Since it is such a common use case, it’s very convenient to have it built into Rails.

Add token into existing model:

To add a secure token column to an existing model, you can use the 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 and 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

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:

You can specify multiple token attributes 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:

If you want to generate token and save it to the database, you can now use regenerate_token method to generate new token:

   
    user.auth_token
    # cSlvzXl6kVvWUj4iNahElQ
    user.regenerate_token
    # xr4naoc77wYATGehnFb5Mg