Generate Random Api Key Python

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Most pythonic way to generate a URL safe unique key or token is to use secrets module. Use secrets.tokenurlsafe it will return a secure random URL-safe text string. The secrets module uses synchronization methods to ensure that no two processes can obtain the same data at the same time. The process is the same, but you'll need to use a little more arithmetic to make sure that the random integer is in fact a multiple of five. Check out the code below: import random for x in range (1 0): print random. Randint (1,21). 5, print. Basically this code will generate a random number between 1 and 20, and then multiply that number by 5.

2018-02-16T22:25:45Z

Posted by Miguel Grinberg under Security, Programming, Python.

When working with web applications, it is often necessary to generate passwords, tokens or API keys, to be assigned to clients to use as authentication. While there are many sophisticated ways to generate these, in many cases it is perfectly adequate to use sufficiently long and random sequences of characters. The problem is that if you are doing this in Python, there is more than one way to generate random strings, and it isn't always clear which way is the best and most secure.

You would think that adding yet one more method to generate random strings would confuse things even more, but unlike all the other options, the new secrets module introduced in Python 3.6 is actually designed for this specific use case, so from my part it is a welcome addition to the Python standard library. In this short article I'm going to give you an overview of this new module.

Generating Tokens

The secrets module is part of the Python standard library in Python 3.6 and newer. You can import this module into your application or into a Python shell as follows:

At the core of this module there are three functions that generate random tokens using the best random number generator provided by your system. The first function generates binary sequences of random bytes:

Invoking the token_bytes() function without any arguments returns a token with a default length that is determined to be sufficiently safe and secure. You can also pass the desired length as an argument, as you can see in the second example above.

The token_hex() function works in a similar way, but returns a string with the bytes rendered in hexadecimal notation instead of a raw binary string:

With this function, each byte in the sequence is rendered as two hexadecimal digits, so in the second example above, where I request a token with 20 characters, the resulting string is going to be 40 characters long.

The third function in this group is token_urlsafe(), which returns the random string encoded in base64 format:

The base64 encoding is more efficient than hexadecimal. In the example above you can see that when I requested a token of 20 characters, the resulting base64 encoded string is 27 characters long.

How to know when to use each of these functions? For most cases, the token_urlsafe() function is probably the best option, so start from that one. If you prefer random strings encoded in hexadecimal notation (which will give you only characters in the 0-9 and a-f ranges) then use token_hex(). Finally, if you prefer a raw binary string, without any encodings, then use token_bytes().

There are many use cases that benefit from have a simple and secure way to generate tokens. Here are a few examples:

API keys that are given to clients after they authenticate with username and password
Password reset tokens to be sent to the user by email
Initial passwords for new accounts (you will likely want users to change their password after the first login)
IDs for background tasks or other asynchronous operations
Passwords to assign to other services such as databases, message queues, etc.
Dynamically created unique URLs

Python Generate Random Character

Generating Random Numbers

While the token generation functions I described in the previous section are the most useful, the secrets module also provides a few functions that deal with random numbers.

The choice() function returns a randomly selected item from the list provided as an argument:

This function can be combined with a list comprehension to generate random strings that only use a specific set of characters. For example, if you want to generate a random string of 20 characters that only uses the letters abcd you can do so as follows:

The randbelow() function generates a random integer number between 0 and the number given as an argument (not including this number):

Finally, the randbits() function returns an random integer number that has the specified number of bits: