Temp-Token - A Simple PHP Temporary Token Generator

Why?

I needed a temporary password reset token generating when a user 'forgot their password'. Although a nice feature, pulling in dependencies for storage seemed overkill and decided to just spin up a quick library that generated a very unique token (it can be made even more unique via a 'salt' - something unique to that instance) and a expiration DateTime object for that token.

I suppose you could use it for any scenario requiring a temporary, guaranteed to expire token - my use case was simply a password reset link token.

What exactly?

Basically this package allows you to generate two things:

1. A unique token
2. An expiration time for the above token

For ease you can simply store these inside a users table once a password has been reset, send the user a link to the unique url - and assuming the token matches and hasn't expired let them reset their password.

Installation:

This library is published on packagist.org, to install you will need the following in your projects composer.json:

{
	"require": {
		"mattkirwan/temp-token": "1.0.*"
	},	
	"minimum-stability": "dev"
}

Once you have that, simply run:

php composer.phar update

and then use...

Usage:

require './vendor/autoload.php';

// Instantiate a new TempToken object
$temp_token = new MattKirwan\TempToken\TempToken();

// Optionally set a unique salt (maybe a username?) for more randomness in the token
$temp_token->set_unique_salt($username);

// Optionally set the token lifetime in seconds - defaults to 1 hour (3600 secs)
$temp_token->set_token_lifetime_secs(7200);

// Optionally set a date format for the token expiration DateTime object
$temp_token->set_date_format('d-m-Y');

// Generates a new token and token expiration
$temp_token->generate_token();

// Retrieve the token
$token = $temp_token->get_token();

// Retrieve a token expiration DateTime
$token_expires = $temp_token->get_token_expiration();