How to generate uuids in a Ruby on Rails application

Have you decided to use universally unique identifiers instead of auto incrementing integers for primary keys in your database table?

You can generate those UUID’s using SecureRandom.uuid

=> SecureRandom.uuid
"7c8fdaa5-830e-44e0-9a8c-d9785ed60802"

Tip: I cover creating a table with a non-id primary key in this post.

If you need to exchange a unique identifier with another system, there is another method to handle that, SecureRandom.urlsafe_base64.

=> SecureRandom.urlsafe_base64
"mEUXmeXenXUiCNI69xULbQ"