EctoHashids

IDs are hard.

Ecto, out of the box, works really well with sequential ids. But then, you release your fancy new service and your users see a url like /purchases/4 and the illusion that you have any sort of traction is gone.

How do others solve this?

Some solve this w/ UUIDs, meaning your users instead see /purchase/051c022e-8b9d-4d32-991d-58ad00a92d59 and that might suit you very well, but there are some annoyances that come up w/ UUIDs

they are really ugly
it isn't "memorable" (think "here's your confirmation number")
they take up a more space in the DB
ecto, out of the box, assumes sequential ids so you have to do some (easy) customization

What does this library do about it?

EctoHashids is essentially an Ecto Type generator where you configure which schemas you want to expose hashids instead of sequential ids, and w/ 1 line in your schema, you can now interact w/ that model w/ the hashid instead of the sequential id.

In the above example, your user could now see: /purchases/o_5zabk

IMPORTANT:

Some folks (rightly) want to avoid sequential ids for security reasons I.e if I am shown /purchases/1, I could just change the 1 to a 2 and see information about some other purchase.

This library DOESN'T HELP w/ the above security hole. A user can just as easily guess a random hashid (since they are short and wonderful) as they can a sequential id.

Any solution to solving the security hole to sequential ids can and should be added onto of these Hashids if it's devastating for a user to find their way to a url you were expecting. (ex: /purchases/o_5zabk/some-token-for-this-id)

Installation

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

def deps do
  [
    {:ecto_hashids, "~> 0.0.1"}
  ]
end

Configuration

The very minimal configuration you'll need is to define which schemas you want to generate these types for. Let's say you have a single Schema called Purchase and hou want to have p_abc123-looking hashids, you can do this in two steps:

config :ecto_hashids,
  prefix_descriptions: %{
    p: Purchase
  }

This will auto-generate a module for you: EctoHashids.Types.P.

All you have to do is use that as your primary key inside your Purchase schema:

@primary_key {:id, EctoHashids.Types.P, read_after_writes: true}

If you have any relationships that belong_to :purchase, you'll need to tell ecto how to handle that as well:

belongs_to :purchase, Purchase, type: EctoHashids.Types.P

And you're done!

Recommended Configuration:

config :ecto_hashids,
  prefix_separator: "_",                         # What goes after the prefix?
  characters: "0123456789abcdefghjkmnpqrstvwxyz", # Which characters should be valid for hashid
  salt: "fef02203-0e9c-45d4-89f2-f2ac7d154f36",  # What do you want to use for a salt for creating hashids
  prefix_descriptions: %{
    p: Purchase,                                 # Include all of your modules
  }

Final thoughts

The only annoyance that can come w/ hashids is that you don't see them when looking inside the DB via a db-client of some sort. This means in your logs you'll see, oh user "u_abc123" is doing something bad. You want to quickly find out which actual user ID that is in your DB and you are a bit stuck. This library has some utility functions to help you:

# Will dump the primary key
EctoHashids.id!("u_abc123")

# Inversely, this will encode the sequential id for you
EctoHashids.id!({"u", 10})

Putting it all together:

%{hashid: hashid, pkey: 10, prefix: "p"} = EctoHashids.id!({"p", 10})

%Purchase{id: hashid} = Repo.get(Purchase, hashid)

The docs can be found at https://hexdocs.pm/ecto_hashids.

peek-travel/ecto_hashids