Secure random token in Node.js

Question

In this question Erik needs to generate a secure random token in Node.js. There\'s the method crypto.randomBytes that generates a random Buffer. However, the ba

Answer 1

The up-to-date right way to do this asynchronously using ES 2016 standards of async and await (as of Node 7) would be the following:

const crypto = require('crypto');

function generateToken({ stringBase = 'base64', byteLength = 48 } = {}) {
  return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
    crypto.randomBytes(byteLength, (err, buffer) => {
      if (err) {
        reject(err);
      } else {
        resolve(buffer.toString(stringBase));
      }
    });
  });
}

async function handler(req, res) {
   // default token length
   const newToken = await generateToken();
   console.log('newToken', newToken);

   // pass in parameters - adjust byte length
   const shortToken = await generateToken({byteLength: 20});
   console.log('newToken', shortToken);
}

This works out of the box in Node 7 without any Babel transformations