Generate a universally unique identifier (UUID) in PHP

14/12/2019

Here is a simple PHP function to generate version 4 UUID's:

// Generate a RFC-4122 compliant globally 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));
}