Uniquey

Uniquey (you-KNEE-key) is a node library that generates random unique strings (or keys).

Why?

Yeah, there are UUIDs, and we mostly use v4 (random) ones. But we usually store these 128bit keys as TEXT in a database, which is 32 characters which are larger than 128 bits. So rather than hex, why not base62 (A-Za-z0-9) or even any alphabet? How about always eight characters? A Base62 alphabet and eight characters will give you a total of 2.18*10^14 unique keys, pretty good.

Are Collisions Possible?

Yes, but you can make it less possible by adjusting the length to 22, and you will get a slightly less chance of a collision as UUID v4. With the bonus of only being 22 characters (or even fewer with a larger alphabet).

How random?

Yeah, there are a bunch of less than good ways to generate random stuff in node/javascript. The base of this library uses Crypto.randomFillSync to allocate a bunch of random bytes. This process is similar to how the UUID library generates v4 UUIDs.

Is it blocking? Is it fast?

Yes, and it depends. On my M1 MacBook Air, I can generate 1,000,000 keys in less than 300ms. That seems fast, and was with the default settings. Your performance may be different.

Multi-Byte Characters?

Ugh, well this was fixed in version 1.1, sorry. So a multi-byte character (like 🏢) will be split as a whole character as it's self and not each byte. Support for multi-byte characters needs to be turned on explicitly with the multiByteCharacters option in the constructor.

How to Use

Install it with

yarn add uniquey

or

npm i uniquey

Sample code:

import Uniqee from 'uniquey' 
// or const Uniqee = require('uniquey').default

const uniquey = new Uniquey()

console.log(uniquey.create())

// outputs random string like `HqiId0Sj`

Options

You can create a Uniquey instance with the following optional options:

• length [number]: (default: 8) the length of string to create. Must be greater than 0 and less than allocation.
• characters [string]: (default: '0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ') the characters to use in the random output. Must be at least 2 characters and no more than 256 and not have any duplicates.
• allocate [number]: (default: 256) number of random bytes to allocate. This allocation helps with performance. Must be greater than length and greater than 0.
• multiByteCharacters [boolean]: (default: false) allow multi-byte characters, if true they will be allowed, if not the creation will throw an error if characters contains multi-byte characters.

Example using options:

import Uniquey from 'uniquey'
// or const Uniquey = require('uniquey').default

const uniquey = new Uniquey({length: 4, characters: '🐈🏢🐕🐎', allocate: 4000, multiByteCharacters: true})

console.log(uniquey.create())

// outputs random string like `🐎🐈🏢🐕` 
// not very random but fun!
// also this will allocate new random bytes 
// after generating 1000 random keys (4000/4)

New in Version 1.1.0

Better handling of multi-byte characters.