yeast

What is yeast?

The yeast npm package is a simple utility for generating unique IDs based on the current time. It is lightweight and designed to be used in environments where unique identifiers are needed, such as in distributed systems or for generating unique keys in databases.

What are yeast's main functionalities?

Generate Unique IDs

This feature allows you to generate a unique ID based on the current time. The generated ID is a string that can be used as a unique identifier in various applications.

const yeast = require('yeast');
const uniqueID = yeast();
console.log(uniqueID);

Other packages similar to yeast

uuid

The uuid package is a popular library for generating universally unique identifiers (UUIDs). Unlike yeast, which generates IDs based on the current time, uuid generates IDs that are globally unique and can be used in a wide range of applications. It supports multiple versions of UUIDs, including time-based, random, and namespace-based UUIDs.

shortid

The shortid package is another library for generating short, unique, non-sequential IDs. It is similar to yeast in that it generates short IDs, but it uses a different algorithm that ensures the IDs are unique even across distributed systems. shortid is useful for cases where you need a human-readable ID that is still unique.

nanoid

The nanoid package is a modern library for generating unique IDs with a focus on performance and security. It generates shorter IDs than uuid and is more secure than shortid. nanoid is suitable for use in both client-side and server-side applications and provides a good balance between ID length and uniqueness.

README

yeast

Yeast is a unique id generator. It was primary designed to generate a unique id which can be used for cache busting in requests. A common practise for this is to use a time stamp. But there are couple of down sides when using timestamps.

1. The times tamp is already 13 chars long. This might not matter for 1 request but if you make hundreds of them this quickly adds up in bandwidth and processing time.
2. It's not unique enough. If you generate two stamps right after each other the time wouldn't have passed yet so they would be identical.

Yeast solves both of these issues by:

1. Compressing the generated time stamp to a string instead of a number using toSting(36).
2. Seed the generated id when the previous generated id is the same as the one it just generated.

To keep the strings unique it will use the : char to separate the generated stamp from the seed. As we're using toString(36) to encode the time stamp you can still retrieve the actual time stamp by parsing it again using parseInt(yeastID, 36).

Installation

The module is intended to be used in browsers as well as in Node.js and is therefor released in the npm registry and can be installed using:

npm install --save yeast

Usage

This module only exposes one single interface, so when you require yeast it will return a function that generates the unique ids:

'use strict';

var yeast = require('yeast');

console.log(yeast(), yeast(), yeast()); // outputs: i24hcpc4 i24hcpc4:0 i24hcpc4:1

setTimeout(function () {
  console.log(yeast()); // outputs: i24hd9hw
});

That's all folks. If you have ideas on how we can further compress the ids please open an issue!

License

MIT