Xid

Xid is a globally unique id generator.

Xid uses the Mongo Object ID algorithm to generate globally unique ids with a different serialization format (base64) to make it shorter when transported as a string. (https://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/object-id/)

The format is made up of:

4-byte value representing the seconds since the Unix epoch
3-byte machine identifier
2-byte process id
3-byte counter, starting with a random value.

The serialized format is lowercase base32 which offers the best compromise between readability, sortability & conciseness.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'xid'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install xid

Usage

require 'xid'

xid = Xid.generate
# => <Xid::Xid ltjfwwb3n4jbqxia5ela>

xid.to_s
# => "ltjfwzz3n4jbqxiasmka"

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Attributions

This gem is based on the original Go library with inspiration taken from a Python port.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/ignitionapp/xid.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.