Hash IDs

Hashing your internal IDs, is very helpful feature for securing your application (i.e., to prevent some kind of attacks) and business reasons (to hide the real total records from your competitors).

Enable Hash ID

Set the HASH_ID=true in the .env file. Also with the feature make sure to always use the getHashedKey() on any model, whenever you need to return an ID (mainly within Transformers) whether hashed ID or not.

Example:

'id' => $user->getHashedKey(),

Note that if the feature is set to false (e.g., HASH_ID=false) the getHashedKey() will return the normal (unhashed) ID.

Usage

There are 2 ways an ID’s can be passed to your system via the API:

• Via URL Segment: (e.g., www.hive.local/items/abcdef).
• Via URL Query Parameters (e.g., GET www.hive.local/items?id=abcdef.

In both cases, however, you will need to inform your API about specific parts of that need to be decoded..

Checkout the Requests page. After setting the $decode and $urlParameters properties on your Request class, the ID will be automatically decoded for you, to apply validation rules on it or/and use it from your controller ($request->id will now return the decoded ID).

Configuration

You can change the default length and characters used in the ID from the config file app/Ship/Configs/hashids.php or in the .env file by editing the HASH_ID_LENGTH value.

You can set the HASH_ID_KEY in the .env file to any random string. You can generate this from any of the online random string generators, or run head /dev/urandom | tr -dc 'A-Za-z0-9!"#$%&'\''()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_{|}~' | head -c 32 ; echo on the linux commandline. HiveApi defaults to the APP_KEY should this not be set.

The HASH_ID_KEY acts as the salt during the process of hashing IDs. This should never be changed in production as it renders all previously generated IDs useless!

Testing

In your tests you must hash the ID’s before making the calls, because if you tell your Request class to decode an ID for you, it will throw an exception when the ID is not encoded.

For Parameter ID’s

Always use getHashedKey() on your models when you want to get the ID.

Example:

$data = [
    'roles_ids' => [
        $role1->getHashedKey(),
        $role2->getHashedKey(),
    ],
    'user_id'   => $randomUser->getHashedKey(),
];
$response = $this->makeCall($data);

*Or you can do this manually Hashids::encode($id);. *

For URL ID’s

You can use this helper function injectId($id, $skipEncoding = false, $replace = '{id}').

Example:

$response = $this->injectId($admin->id)->makeCall();

More details on the [Tests Helpers]({{ site.baseurl }}{% link _docs/miscellaneous/tests-helpers.md %}) page.

Availability

You can apply the HiveApi\Core\Traits\HashIdTrait to any Model or class, in order to have the encode and decode functions ready set up. By default you have access to these functions $this->encode($id) and $this->decode($id) from all your Tests class and Controllers.