UXID

!MIT License]badge_license_url] [hex.pm [hex.pm

UXIDs are identifiers which:

  • Describe the resource (aid in debugging and investigation)
  • Prononounceable - easily and accurately transmit characters to another human using a telephone
  • Work well with copy and paste (double clicking selects the entire ID)
  • Can be shortened for low cardinality resources
  • Are very unlikely to collide (more likely with less randomness)
  • 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

Generating UXIDs

# 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"

Ecto

UXIDs can be used as Ecto fields including primary keys.

defmodule YourApp.User do
  use Ecto.Schema

  @primary_key {:id, Ecto.UXID, autogenerate: true, prefix: "usr", rand_size: 5}
  schema "users" do
    field :generated_uxid, Ecto.UXID, autogenerate: true, prefix: "apikey"
    field :api_secret, Ecto.UXID, prefix: "apisecret"
  end
end

Installation

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

def deps do
  [
    {:uxid, "~> 0.1"}
  ]
end

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