Easiest way to create secure and random strings for your JWT, session and cookie secrets.

While in development or even in production, I just find it difficult to come up with secrets for my JWTs, cookies, sessions, etc...

I first came across openssl rand command in next-auth's docs.

It is as simple as

openssl rand -base64 40

But, can we build on it to make our lives easier with xclip to copy the output directly it into the clipboard.

openssl rand -base64 40 | xclip -r -selection clipboard

Explaining openssl

• The openssl program is a command line tool for using the various cryptography functions of OpenSSL's crypto library from the shell.
• rand : Generate pseudo-random bytes.
• -base64 : Converts the bytes into base64 encoded string.
• Length : In the example, I've used 40 which just means 40 random bytes will be generated and that will be encoded into base64.

Explaining xclip -tags

• -r or -rmlastnl : When the last character of the selection is a newline character, remove it. Newline characters that are not the last character in the selection are not affected. If the selection does not end with a newline character, this option has no effect. This option is useful for copying one-line output of programs like pwd to the clipboard to paste it again into the command prompt without executing the line immediately due to the character pwd appends.
• -selection : Specify which X selection to use, options are "primary" to use XA_PRIMARY (default), "secondary" for XA_SECONDARY or "clipboard" for XA_CLIPBOARD. I usually use clipboard, since I haven't found a good use case for the other options in my workflow.