UXID

UXIDs are identifiers which:

  • describe the resource (to help in debugging and investigation)
  • work well with copy and paste (double clicking should select the entire ID)
  • can be shortened for low cardinality resources
  • are very unlikely to collide
  • are secure against enumeration attacks
  • can be generated by application code (not tied to the datastore)
  • are K-sortable (lexicographically sortable by time - works well with datastore indexing)
  • do not require any coordination (human or automated) at startup, or generation

Many of the concepts of Stripe IDs have been used in this library.

Usage

# No options generates a basic ULID
UXID.generate! # "01EMDGJF0DQXQJ8FM78XE97Y3H"

# A prefix can be provided
UXID.generate! prefix: "cus" # "cus_01EMDGJF0DQXQJ8FM78XE97Y3H"

# The amount of randomness can be decreased for smaller cardinality resources
UXID.generate! prefix: "cus", rand_size: 4 # "cus_01EMDGN5QAGPWSKN2"

Installation

The package can be installed by adding uxid to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:uxid, "~> 0.0.3"}
  ]
end

Documentation can be generated with ExDoc and published on HexDocs. Once published, the docs can be found at https://hexdocs.pm/uxid.