README

A CakePHP plugin for using secure, non-incremental IDs for models.

Introduction

What are Secure IDs?

Secure IDs are a way to use non-incremental, non-guessable, randomly-generated unique identifiers to records in your database. This solves a whole host of problems, from usability to security and beyond. For more information, check out Tom Scott's great video Will YouTube Ever Run Out of Video IDs?

What is CakePHP?

CakePHP is a rapid-development PHP web application framework that uses the MVC (Models/Views/Controllers) architecture. It was first released in August 2005 and is now on version 3.0 and is more powerful than ever! One of CakePHP's great features is that it supports extending its own functionality via the use of plugins, of which this is one.

For more information about CakePHP, visit their website at CakePHP.org.

Installation

Prerequisites

• PHP 7.x
• CakePHP 3.x

Command-Line Installation

Using Composer is the recommended way of installing this plugin because it allows you to easily download the plugin and its dependencies and keep them up-to-date and make use of Composer's awesome class auto-loader.

To install the plugin using Composer:

1. Open a terminal and cd to your CakePHP application's root directory.
2. Run composer require jamisonbryant/cakephp-secureids-plugin to download the plugin and its dependencies.
3. If you'd like, open composer.json for editing and modify the versioning schema for the plugin to your liking.

Manual Installation

You can also install the plugin manually by clicking the "Download ZIP" button above and unzipping it into your CakePHP application's plugins/ directory, however if you do this you will have to perform updates manually as well.

If you're familiar with git you can also download the repository directly to your hard drive using git clone. This allows you to stay on the bleeding-edge of the plugin's development, but be warned that it's called "bleeding-edge" for a reason.

Setup

To add the plugin to your application, activate the plugin in your application's bootstrap file:

Plugin::load('SecureIds');

Or use the Cake shell:

./bin/cake plugin load SecureIds

NOTE: You must add the columns bid (for Base64 ID) and uuid (for UUID) to the table schemas of each model you want to have secure IDs. You can do this easily by running the included migration (requires the CakePHP Migrations plugin):

./bin/cake migrations migrate -p SecureIds

Usage

Because the plugin's functionality is implemented as a Behavior, you need to apply the behavior (called the Identifiable behavior) to each model you want to use it on. To do this, you need to create a table definition class for each model that you want to be able to fetch secure IDs for:

// File: src/Model/Table/ArticlesTable.php

namespace App\Model\Table;

use Cake\ORM\Table;

class ArticlesTable extends Table
{
    public function initialize(array $config)
    {
        $this->addBehavior('SecureIds.Identifiable');
    }
}

The above code assumes that we are working with an Article model, obviously you should substitute your own model name. Note: You may (read: probably will) have to create a table definition file for each model, because CakePHP does not do this for you by default, preferring instead to infer what your table definition is like on-the-fly. This is great for most use cases, however when we want more control (to add a behavior, say), we need to create the files ourselves.

Testing

You can test the plugin using CakePHP's built-in support for PHPUnit, however this assumes two things:

1. You have PHPUnit globally installed and the phpunit command available from the command-line
2. You didn't delete the phpunit.xml.dist that is created with new CakePHP 3.x applications

To test the plugin, first add its test suites to the application's PHPUnit config file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<phpunit ...>
    ...
    <testsuites>
        <testsuite name="App Test Suite">
            <directory>tests/TestCase</directory>
        </testsuite>

        <!-- Add these lines -->
        <testsuite name="Secure IDs Plugin Test Suite">
            <directory>vendor/jamisonbryant/cakephp-secureids-plugin/tests/TestCase</directory>
        </testsuite>
    </testsuites>
    ...
</phpunit>

Next, cd to your application's root directory and run phpunit.

If that doesn't work, run composer dump-autoload and try again.

Contributing

Bug Reports

If you find a bug in the plugin, or know of a missing feature you'd like to see added, feel free to create an issue on the Issues page. When reporting a bug, be as descriptive as possible. Include what you were doing when the bug occurred, what might have caused it to occur, and how to reproduce it if possible. Screenshots are nice, too.

As a matter of courtesy, please use the search tool to verify that an issue has not already been reported before creating a new issue. Feel free to add your comments/+1's to an open bug/feature request, but duplicate issues take time to prune and crowd out new, important issues.

Pull Requests

Found a bug you think you can fix? By all means go ahead! Clone the affected branch, fix the bug, then create a pull request and I'll review and accept it as quickly as I can. However, before submitting a pull request, please be sure that your code follows the PSR-2 code style guidelines. PRs that don't follow the style guidelines will be rejected! (politely, of course)

Legal

License

Licensed under the MIT License (MIT). See LICENSE.md for details.

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2019 Jamison Bryant. All rights reserved.