Show HN: Givemeguid.com – CLI/curl friendly GUIDs

http://givemeguid.com

by deweyair • 6 years ago

32 46 6 years ago

givemeguid.com

deweyair4• 6 years ago

Instructions are in the headers. Query string params for returning multiple GUIDs, and optionally returning JSON.

nonoesp• 6 years ago

- https://www.givemeguid.com/?json=1

- https://www.givemeguid.com/?number=5

tkfu• 6 years ago

I'm having trouble imagining who would want to use this. What's the environment where you would have curl and a need for generating UUIDs, but wouldn't have access to uuidgen or similar?

p4bl0• 6 years ago

This, and also, are GUID that pose a problem with CLI/curl really a thing?

MrGilbert• 6 years ago

Maybe a JS App which is made completely out of third party APIs, without anything self-hosted? Not discussing wether this is a good idea or not, though...

I was surprised to see that there is no "built-in" mechanism in JS to generate a GUID. As a C# dev, I'm used to Guid.NewGuid()

hombre_fatal2• 6 years ago

Why would you make an http request if you can just google a 3-line JS solution? You're just generating a large random number and formatting it as a UUID.

https://gist.github.com/jed/982883

If you google "generate uuid javascript" you can find approaches from Math.random to node/browser `crypto` module to shelling out OS random.

One of the main benefits of guid generation is that you don't need to synchronize with anything to generate a unique ID, so it's weird to incur an http request, especially to someone else's service. At that point you might as well just phone home to your own service.

ubanholzer• 6 years ago

If a programmer isn't able to code a GUID generator and uses a HTTP request instead, he really shouldn't code.

trashburger• 6 years ago

In what world is it safe to rely on an external service to provide GUIDs for you? Where's the guarantee that the service won't one day start manipulating GUIDs? Now you have a major attack vector.

gitgud• 6 years ago

Quick GUID's in JavaScript

    Math.random().toString(32).slice(2,10)

Gives you an 8 character GUID.... but maybe don't use it for anything important....

kelnos• 6 years ago

Yeah, I'm just really confused. If you're at a CLI, you probably have uuidgen. And I'd assume there's something similar on Windows.

If you're writing some kind of application, pretty much every language/framework can generate UUIDs, and even if yours doesn't, just generate a 128-bit number, stamp the v4 UUID bits into it, reformat it, and you're done. Calling out to a 3rd-party service is insane for that use case anyway.

jcelerier2• 6 years ago

Yeah, I'm just really confused. If you're at a CLI, you probably have uuidgen. And I'd assume there's something similar on Windows.

uuidgen is provided by the Windows SDK - exactly the same usage than in *nix

deweyair4• 6 years ago

Understandable! I made it for the few times I'm manually testing an API using Swagger or something similar and need a valid(ish) GUID to stand in for some field being sent to the api.

There's no shortage of ways to generate GUIDs, that's for sure!

fyfy18• 6 years ago

Maybe a NPM module for generating UUIDs? /s

GoblinSlayer• 6 years ago

I will just leave it here: https://www.uuidgenerator.net/api

huhtenberg2• 6 years ago

And why would you do that?

pricechild• 6 years ago

It looks very relevant and has more features?

redact207• 6 years ago

Thanks I'll probably use this. I often want to get a static uuid - usually for adding as static data in a test.

speedgoose3• 6 years ago

If you use Linux:

cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/uuid

aranw2• 6 years ago

This doesn't work on macOS :(

cat: /proc/sys/kernel/random/uuid: No such file or directory

speedgoose3• 6 years ago

I edited, it's a Linux feature.

shean_massey• 6 years ago

TIL something new, thanks!

thinkingkong• 6 years ago

If you need a unique identifier on the command line there are a few ways to do it.

uuidgen is one. My personal favorite is this snippet.

$ id=$(openssl rand 1000 | openssl sha1) && printf "%s${id:0:8}\n"

mormegil• 6 years ago

Why would you want to hash random bytes? The only thing you could theoretically achieve by that would be decreasing entropy. Just do openssl rand -hex 20 (or any other number of bytes as needed, or -base64 for another encoding).

aranw2• 6 years ago

Nice! I think this will still have a use and is a nice addition to add another alternative way to generate uuids

I use the following alias to generate uuids

   function uuid() { uuidgen | tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]" | tr -d "\n\r" }

I then pair it with pbcopy on the mac

   uuidgen | pbcopy

jcelerier2• 6 years ago

one of my most used non-trivial shell commands must be

    uuidgen | awk '{ printf "\"" $1 "\"" }' | xclip -selection clipboard

politelemon• 6 years ago

I remember several years ago using https://newguid.com which was pretty much the same thing - no page furniture, just the new guid. Sadly the domain seems to be on sale now!

There's also https://www.newguid.org/

berkes2• 6 years ago

Sadly the domain seems to be on sale now!

Which is a perfect example why it is bad to rely on a service like this to generate your IDs.

What if I bought it and started emitting predictable IDs? Or non-unique IDs?

queuep• 6 years ago

This is what I use to generate guids with autohotkey: ::;guid:: guid := GUID() StringLower, guid, guid Clipboard := guid SendInput,^v return

GUID() { format = %A_FormatInteger% ; save original integer format SetFormat Integer, Hex ; for converting bytes to hex VarSetCapacity(A,16) DllCall("rpcrt4\UuidCreate","Str",A) Address := &A Loop 16 { x := 256 + *Address ; get byte in hex, set 17th bit StringTrimLeft x, x, 3 ; remove 0x1 h = %x%%h% ; in memory: LS byte first Address++ } SetFormat Integer, %format% ; restore original format h := SubStr(h,1,8) . "-" . SubStr(h,9,4) . "-" . SubStr(h,13,4) . "-" . SubStr(h,17,4) . "-" . SubStr(h,21,12) return h }

antiufo• 6 years ago

Or from PowerShell: [Guid]::NewGuid()

eterm• 6 years ago

New-Guid

Is shorter and easier.

Jaruzel• 6 years ago

Which is in turn, derivated from .NETs 'Guid.NewGuid()'

aloisdg• 6 years ago

I made one for fun (and as a QA exercise for my GF): https://aloisdegouvello.gitlab.io/guid/ GUID as a service. What a time to be alive :)

patricjansson• 6 years ago

Usage information in response headers, me like :)

deweyair4• 6 years ago

Thanks!

raxxorrax2• 6 years ago

Is this just a "random" UUID or does it meet specs of RFC 4122? I have seen countless times when it was just generated as {8}-{4}-{4}-{4}-{12} with complete random numbers. Well, works for most applications...

plasma• 6 years ago

If you use Visual Studio, typing the word (with quotes) “nguid” in the code IDE generates one for you.

deweyair4• 6 years ago

I spend a fair amount of my day in Visual Studio and didn't know this, thanks!

santiagobasulto• 6 years ago

I have uuidgen in my Mac, but also have a tiny alias:

    alias uuid='python -c "import uuid;print(str(uuid.uuid4()))"'

Show HN: Givemeguid.com – CLI/curl friendly GUIDs

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