PHP function to generate v4 UUID

Question

Instead of breaking it down into individual fields, it's easier to generate a random block of data and change the individual byte positions. You should also use a better random number generator than mt_rand().

According to RFC 4122 - Section 4.4, you need to change these fields:

1. time_hi_and_version (bits 4-7 of 7th octet),
2. clock_seq_hi_and_reserved (bit 6 & 7 of 9th octet)

All of the other 122 bits should be sufficiently random.

The following approach generates 128 bits of random data using openssl_random_pseudo_bytes(), makes the permutations on the octets and then uses bin2hex() and vsprintf() to do the final formatting.

function guidv4($data)
{
    assert(strlen($data) == 16);

    $data[6] = chr(ord($data[6]) & 0x0f | 0x40); // set version to 0100
    $data[8] = chr(ord($data[8]) & 0x3f | 0x80); // set bits 6-7 to 10

    return vsprintf('%s%s-%s-%s-%s-%s%s%s', str_split(bin2hex($data), 4));
}

echo guidv4(openssl_random_pseudo_bytes(16));

With PHP 7, generating random byte sequences is even simpler using random_bytes():

function guidv4($data = null)
{
    $data = $data ?? random_bytes(16);
    // ...
}

Taken from this comment on the PHP manual, you could use this:

function gen_uuid() {
    return sprintf( '%04x%04x-%04x-%04x-%04x-%04x%04x%04x',
        // 32 bits for "time_low"
        mt_rand( 0, 0xffff ), mt_rand( 0, 0xffff ),

        // 16 bits for "time_mid"
        mt_rand( 0, 0xffff ),

        // 16 bits for "time_hi_and_version",
        // four most significant bits holds version number 4
        mt_rand( 0, 0x0fff ) | 0x4000,

        // 16 bits, 8 bits for "clk_seq_hi_res",
        // 8 bits for "clk_seq_low",
        // two most significant bits holds zero and one for variant DCE1.1
        mt_rand( 0, 0x3fff ) | 0x8000,

        // 48 bits for "node"
        mt_rand( 0, 0xffff ), mt_rand( 0, 0xffff ), mt_rand( 0, 0xffff )
    );
}

Anyone using composer dependencies, you might want to consider this library: https://github.com/ramsey/uuid

It doesn't get any easier than this:

Uuid::uuid4();

on unix systems, use the system kernel to generate a uuid for you.

file_get_contents('/proc/sys/kernel/random/uuid')

Credit Samveen on https://serverfault.com/a/529319/210994

Note!: Using this method to get a uuid does in fact exhaust the entropy pool, very quickly! I would avoid using this where it would be called frequently.

// php version >= 7
$uuid = vsprintf('%s%s-%s-%s-%s-%s%s%s', str_split(bin2hex(random_bytes(16)), 4));

A slight variation on Jack's answer to add support for PHP < 7:

// Get an RFC-4122 compliant globaly unique identifier
function get_guid() {
    $data = PHP_MAJOR_VERSION < 7 ? openssl_random_pseudo_bytes(16) : random_bytes(16);
    $data[6] = chr(ord($data[6]) & 0x0f | 0x40);    // Set version to 0100
    $data[8] = chr(ord($data[8]) & 0x3f | 0x80);    // Set bits 6-7 to 10
    return vsprintf('%s%s-%s-%s-%s-%s%s%s', str_split(bin2hex($data), 4));
}