id64

Javascript library that generates short identifiers that are time-sortable, url-safe, lexicographically stable, and globally unique.

The identifiers are composed from the characters:

[A-Z][a-z][0-9]_\.

We first generate a v1 uuid with Kelektiv's node-uuid library. We then shift the bits around to make it time sortable and finally encode it with Dominic Tarr's very cool d64. The result is a time sortable, globally unique, lexicographically, stable, url-safe, identifier that is 22 characters long. If you don't care about recovering the underlying uuid, the generated identifier can be reduced to 20 characters.

Install

With yarn:

yarn add id64

With npm:

npm install id64

Usage

For ES5 environments:

var id64 = require('id64');
var id = id64.gen();

For ES6+ environments:

import id64 from 'id64';
const id = id64.gen();

This will return a 22-character id like: 3Ti0cL9b_Z1w0mTZvpk0WF.

UUIDs

You can recover the original v1 UUID encoded in the generated id64 id, as well as the time embedded in that uuid in several formats.

const myID = id64.gen(); // eg, 3Ti0dNwMcl1ojbBHgw3W2.
const origUUID = id64.ungen(myID); // eg, 8f17a310-81a5-11eb-b4be-7312b3c1210c

You can also recover the underlying timestamp of the id in several formats:

const id     = id64.gen();
                                // timestamp of the id as...
const ticks  = id64.ticks(id);  // 100-nanonsecond intervals since gregorian epoch
const micros = id64.micros(id); // microseconds since unix epoch
const millis = id64.millis(id); // milliseconds since unix epoch
const date   = id64.date(id);   // a javascript Date

If you don't care about recovering the underlying UUID, you can get a shorter, 20-character id64 identifier by passing false to the gen() function:

const shorterID = id64.gen(false); // eg, 3Ti0d_i1Fv0x9uTON9YK