node.js hash string?

Question

I have a string that I want to hash. What\'s the easiest way to generate the hash in node.js?

The hash is for versioning, not security.

Answer 1

Even if the hash is not for security, you can use sha instead of md5. In my opinion, the people should forget about md5 for now, it's in the past!

The normal nodejs sha256 is deprecated. So, you have two alternatives for now:

var shajs = require('sha.js')  - https://www.npmjs.com/package/sha.js (used by Browserify)

var hash = require('hash.js')  - https://github.com/indutny/hash.js

I prefer using shajs instead of hash, because I consider sha the best hash function nowadays and you don't need a different hash function for now. So to get some hash in hex you should do something like the following:

sha256.update('hello').digest('hex')