WebServerUid: Easy Unique Browser IDs for Rails

https://swiftype.com/blog/web-server-uid.html

by geweke • 12 years ago

20 11 12 years ago

geweke5• 12 years ago

I'm the author of this gem -- more than happy to help out with it.

The problem it solves is small but important, and this is now the third company at which I've solved it...so I'm sure there are more folks out there dealing with this same issue. ;)

100k• 12 years ago

And now you never need to solve it again! :)

jcampbell13• 12 years ago

This is a good technique to know. I feel like that cookie should be HTTP only though. It looks like nginx doesn't support that out of the box.

geweke5• 12 years ago

Really good point. Even better, I'd really like these cookies to be digitally signed (like Rails' session cookies are by default), so that they're unforgeable.

Seems like it wouldn't be too terribly hard to add to nginx...hmm... ;)

callmeed• 12 years ago

This is cool, thanks for building this.

Besides analytics, seems like this could help SaaS products that want to offer a trial or demo without ever creating an account up front–just spin up an account on the fly with the uid. If they actually signup, marge their real info.

I'll definitely be trying this out.

geweke5• 12 years ago

Sure thing -- I built it because I needed it, but I'm really happy to be able to share it, too.

You definitely could use this for trial/demo accounts, too. You'd want to think carefully about abuse prevention, I suspect, but in the right circumstances it could be a really lightweight way to handle this.

josegonzalez• 12 years ago

This is similar to the Sysadvent 2013 post by TR Jordan on using an `X-Trace` header to track users across your stack:

http://sysadvent.blogspot.com/2013/12/day-5-gentle-introduct...

geweke5• 12 years ago

Nice! Thanks for turning me on to that -- I've been looking for something like that.

I actually think they're pretty different problems. WebServerUid is about uniquely identifying a single browser over hours, days, months, or years, while X-Trace is about tracking a single request over its (hopefully) single-second-at-most lifecycle -- but they're both really useful, and I'm glad you posted that link.

WebServerUid: Easy Unique Browser IDs for Rails

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