uid-safe

What is uid-safe?

The uid-safe npm package is used to generate cryptographically secure, URL-safe unique identifiers. It is commonly used in web development for creating unique session IDs, tokens, and other random identifiers that need to be safe to use in URLs without additional encoding.

What are uid-safe's main functionalities?

Generating URL-safe unique identifiers

This feature allows the generation of URL-safe unique identifiers of a specified length. The code sample demonstrates how to generate an 18-byte unique identifier using the uid-safe package.

const uidSafe = require('uid-safe');

uidSafe(18).then(function(uid) {
  console.log(uid);
});

Other packages similar to uid-safe

uuid

The uuid package is used to create RFC-compliant UUIDs. It offers various versions of UUIDs (v1, v3, v4, v5) and can be used for similar purposes as uid-safe. However, uid-safe focuses on generating URL-safe strings, which is not the primary goal of uuid.

nanoid

NanoID is a tiny, secure, URL-friendly, unique string ID generator. It is similar to uid-safe in that it generates URL-safe identifiers, but it offers a different API and customizable alphabet, which allows for a wider range of possible IDs.

shortid

Shortid is a package that generates short, non-sequential, URL-friendly unique ids. It is similar to uid-safe but is no longer recommended for use in new projects according to its own documentation, due to the limited number of unique IDs it can generate and the lack of maintenance.

README

UID Safe

Create cryptographically secure UIDs safe for both cookie and URL usage. This is in contrast to modules such as rand-token and uid2 whose UIDs are actually skewed due to the use of % and unnecessarily truncate the UID. Use this if you could still use UIDs with - and _ in them.

API

var uid = require('uid-safe')

uid(byteLength, [cb])

Asynchronously create a UID with a specific byte length. Because base64 encoding is used underneath, this is not the string length! For example, to create a UID of length 24, you want a byte length of 18!

If cb is not defined, a promise is returned. However, to use promises, you must either install bluebird or use a version of node.js that has native promises, otherwise your process will crash and die.

uid(18).then(function (string) {
  // do something with the string
})

uid(18, function (err, string) {
  if (err) throw err
  // do something with the string
})

uid.sync(byteLength)

A synchronous version of above.

var string = uid.sync(18)