Short Unique ID (UUID) Generating Library

Generate random or sequential UUID of any length.

This project is open to updates by its users, I ensure that PRs are relevant to the community. In other words, if you find a bug or want a new feature, please help us by becoming one of the contributors ✌️ ! See the contributing section.

Like this module? ❤

Please consider:

• Buying me a coffee ☕
• Supporting me on Patreon 🏆
• Starring this repo on Github 🌟

📣 v4 Notice

BREAKING CHANGES

This project has been completely refactored from v3 to be less "Deno centric" and more good 'ol Typescript.

We tried avoiding breaking changes, and generally succeded.

With that said, for Node.js require use-cases:

• The dist js files are now generated as UMD, named as ShortUniqueId, which means that...

// ...if you get the error "TypeError: ShortUniqueId is not a constructor" then this
const { default: ShortUniqueId } = require('short-unique-id');

// must be refactored to this
const ShortUniqueId = require('short-unique-id');

• The lib directory is now completely removed

Also, the following changes might generate errors in some edge-cases:

• The short_uuid Deno submodule has been completely removed from this repo and now all the logic lives in src/index.ts
• Typings are no longer under the typings directory but are now under the dist directory
• A sourcemap is now included along with the dist files

New Features 🥳

The ability to generate UUIDs that contain a timestamp which can be extracted:

const uid = new ShortUniqueId();

const uidWithTimestamp = uid.stamp(32);
console.log(uidWithTimestamp);
// GDa608f973aRCHLXQYPTbKDbjDeVsSb3

console.log(uid.parseStamp(uidWithTimestamp));
// 2021-05-03T06:24:58.000Z

Default dictionaries (generated on the spot to reduce memory footprint and avoid dictionary injection vulnerabilities):

• number
• alpha
• alpha_lower
• alpha_upper
• alphanum (default when no dictionary is provided to new ShortUniqueId())
• alphanum_lower
• alphanum_upper
• hex

// instantiate using one of the default dictionary strings
const uid = new ShortUniqueId({
  dictionary: 'hex', // the default
});

console.log(uid.dict.join());
// 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,a,b,c,d,e,f

// or change the dictionary after instantiation
uid.setDictionary('alpha_upper');

console.log(uid.dict.join());
// A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,X,Y,Z

Use in CLI

$ npm install -g short-unique-id

$ short-unique-id -h

# Usage:
#   node short-unique-id [OPTION]

# Options:
#   -l, --length=ARG         character length of the uid to generate.
#   -s, --stamp              include timestamp in uid (must be used with --length (-l) of 10 or more).
#   -p, --parse=ARG          extract timestamp from stamped uid (ARG).
#   -d, --dictionaryJson=ARG json file with dictionary array.
#   -h, --help               display this help

Use as module

Add to your project:

// Deno (web module) Import
import ShortUniqueId from 'https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/short-unique-id@latest/src/index.ts';

// ES6 / TypeScript Import
import ShortUniqueId from 'short-unique-id';

// Node.js require
const ShortUniqueId = require('short-unique-id');

Instantiate and use:

//Instantiate
const uid = new ShortUniqueId();

// Random UUID
console.log(uid());

// Sequential UUID
console.log(uid.seq());

Use in browser

<!-- Add source (minified 7.2K) -->
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/short-unique-id@latest/dist/short-unique-id.min.js"></script>

<!-- Usage -->
<script>
  // Instantiate
  var uid = new ShortUniqueId();

  // Random UUID
  document.write(uid());

  // Sequential UUID
  document.write(uid.seq());
</script>

Options

Options can be passed when instantiating uid:

const options = { ... };

const uid = new ShortUniqueId(options);

For more information take a look at the docs.

Available for

• Node.js (npm)
• Deno
• Browsers

Documentation with Online Short UUID Generator

You can find the docs and online generator at:

https://shortunique.id

What is the probability of generating the same id again?

This largely depends on the given dictionary and the selected UUID length.

Out of the box this library provides a shuffled dictionary of digits from 0 to 9, as well as the alphabet from a to z both in UPPER and lower case, with a default UUID length of 6. That gives you a total of 56,800,235,584 possible UUIDs.

So, given the previous values, the probability of generating a duplicate in 1,000,000 rounds is ~0.00000002, or about 1 in 50,000,000.

If you change the dictionary and/or the UUID length then we have provided the function collisionProbability() function to calculate the probability of hitting a duplicate in a given number of rounds (a collision) and the function uniqueness() which provides a score (from 0 to 1) to rate the "quality" of the combination of given dictionary and UUID length (the closer to 1, higher the uniqueness and thus better the quality).

To find out more about the math behind these functions please refer to the API Reference.

Acknowledgement and platform support

This repo and npm package started as a straight up manual transpilation to ES6 of the short-uid npm package by Ankit Kuwadekar.

Since this package is now reporting 12k+ npm weekly downloads, we've gone ahead and re-written the whole of it in TypeScript and made sure to package dist modules compatible with Deno, Node.js and all major Browsers.

Development

Clone this repo:

# SSH
git clone git@github.com:jeanlescure/short-unique-id.git

# HTTPS
git clone https://github.com/jeanlescure/short-unique-id.git

Tests run using:

yarn test

Build

In order to publish the latest changes you must build the distribution files:

yarn build

Then commit all changes and run the release script:

yarn release

Contributing

Yes, thank you! This plugin is community-driven, most of its features are from different authors. Please update the docs and tests and add your name to the package.json file.

Contributors ✨

Thanks goes to these wonderful people (emoji key):

💻	🚧 💻 🖋 📖 ⚠️	💻	💻
💻 👀	💻	💻	🤔
🛡️

License

Copyright (c) 2018-2021 Short Unique ID Contributors.
Licensed under the Apache License 2.0.