has_protected_token

I recently released has_protected_token to the world. It’s my first ever Ruby gem and I’m pretty happy with it.

Its purpose is to abstract away generating, storing and authenticating against randomly-generated user tokens in Ruby applications using ActiveRecord. I envisage it being used for things like shared secrets and API keys, etc.

These sorts of tokens often have access power similar to that of a common user password, so the gem salts and hashes them before storage in the database using BCrypt.

If you don’t want this feature or don’t think hashing the token is worthwhile, there is an alternative gem called has_secure_token which stores the token as plain text.

Usage instructions and contribution guidelines are in the github repo if you’d like to check it out.

Pull requests, feature suggestions, bug reports, etc are all very welcome.

Code on Github