fastnanoid

fastnanoid

fastnanoid is a tiny, secure URL-friendly, and fast unique string ID generator for Python, written in Rust.

It works as a drop in replacement for py-nanoid's generate():

- from nanoid import generate
+ from fastnanoid import generate

It's 2.8x faster than the original.

When not to use it

If you need the same amount of entropy as uuid, you may as well use uuid and base64url encode it:

import uuid
from fastnanoid import urlid_to_uuid, uuid_to_urlid
# say you have a uuid, maybe from your database:
id_ = uuid.uuid4() # type: uuid.UUID
# you can encoded it in base64url so it displays as a short string:
urlid = uuid_to_urlid(id_) # type: str
# and when you read it back in from the user, you can convert it back to a normal UUID:
decoded_urlid = urlid_to_uuid(urlid) # type: UUID

This is simpler than using a nanoid which is not compliant with any existing standards. If you already have a generated UUID (say from a database), this is much faster than generating a new nanoid. (If you don't have a UUID, generating one plus encoding it in base64url is about 50% slower than fastnanoid.)

* these are very simple helper functions, you can easily implement them yourself and save a dependency.

Contributing

# local env
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
# build and use
maturin develop
python -c 'import fastnanoid; print(fastnanoid.generate())'
# test
cargo test
pytest
mypy
ruff check
ruff format --check

Credits

Inspired by py-nanoid