Creating a random salt

PHP
1

I’m trying to find a good way to create a random salt to encrypt a password as in

crypt($pw, $salt);

I’ve googled and googled but can’t find a suitable answer. One suggestion was

base64_encode($pw);

which is hardly random.
I’m using PHP 5.3
Any ideas welcome. Thanks.

2

What are you wanting to do?

It is better to know what your needs are and then someone can best advise you.

3

Why not do…


$password = "hello123";
$random_salt = md5(rand(1,1000000000000) . date("y-m-d h:i:s") . "8239fjefjwfkk");
$password = crypt($password, $random_salt);
4

What I want to do is create an encrypted password for use with .htaccess/.htpasswd

5

Ah- thanks Patche!