puidv7

puidv7: Prefixed UUIDv7's

This library helps with generating, encoding, and parsing a puidv7.

You can continue to store IDs as UUIDv7 in your database, using the included Drizzle ORM custom type. There are helpers for converting to/from UUID format.

What is a puidv7?

It's a prefixed UUIDv7 which:

1. Is encoded using base32 crockford encoding
2. Is always lowercase
3. Does not contain any hyphens
4. Is prefixed with a 3 character alphabetic (a-z) prefix

UUIDv7 <> puidv7 conversion example

Check out the online converter at https://refreshjs.org/puidv7 or step through the following examples...

With acc prefix:

• UUIDv7 = 01970a1c-e31e-7422-9cd5-e9651d11cc97

• puidv7 = acc06bgm7733st2576nx5jht4ecjw

How to manually verify:

• Remove dashes from the UUIDv7 to get the HEX-encoded string

  e.g. 01970a1c-e31e-7422-9cd5-e9651d11cc97 becomes 01970a1ce31e74229cd5e9651d11cc97

• Convert the HEX-encoded string to crockford base32 e.g. Use https://cryptii.com/pipes/crockford-base32 with Bytes (in Hexadecimal format), and Encode to Base32 (Crockford's Base32 variant).

  i.e. 01970a1ce31e74229cd5e9651d11cc97 becomes 06BGM7733ST2576NX5JHT4ECJW

• Convert the value to lowercase and add the prefix.

  e.g. 06BGM7733ST2576NX5JHT4ECJW becomes 06bgm7733st2576nx5jht4ecjw

  then 06bgm7733st2576nx5jht4ecjw becomes acc06bgm7733st2576nx5jht4ecjw

Why does the world need puidv7?

Because:

1. UUIDv7 is great for databases and distributed systems
2. UUIDv7 is not as great for end users/humans

Advantages of the human-friendly puidv7 format:

1. URL-safe and case insensitive
2. Shorter than UUIDv7 (29 characters vs 36)
3. Easier to copy & paste (no hypens)
4. Less prone to human errors (base32 crockford swaps O for 0, I/l for 1)
5. Types can be inferred (great for customer support, future-proofing APIs)

Dependencies

We aim to use minimal packages but have opted for:

• Uses the uuidv7 package for generating new UUIDs in v7 format.
• Uses the @scure/base package for encoding and decoding the UUIDs in crockford base32 format.

TypeScript & Go support

This is both a TypeScript and Go package.

If you would like to use puidv7 in Go with a github.com/go-playground/validator/v10 validator:

func ValidatePuidv7(fl validator.FieldLevel) bool {
	_, err := puidv7.Decode(fl.Field().String(), "")
	if err != nil {
		return false
	}
	return true
}
func Example() {
  validate := validator.New(validator.WithRequiredStructEnabled())
  if err := validate.RegisterValidation("puidv7", ValidatePuidv7); err != nil {
    fmt.Printf("error registering puidv7 validator: %v\n", err)
  }
  if err := validate.Struct(struct {
    ID    string `validate:"required,puidv7"`
  }{
    ID:    "abc06awcb4f5hzmfey7qwt7s8a6q4",
  }); err != nil {
    fmt.Printf("validation errors: %+s\n", err)
  }
}

Further Reading

• Stripe's Designing APIs for humans: Object IDs article.
• Buildkite's Goodbye integers. Hello UUIDv7! article.
• Douglas Crockford Base32 page.
• RFC 4122 - A Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) URN Namespace.

Credit

Thank you to Nadrama.com for sponsoring this work!

Security

Please reach out to Nadrama or @ryan0x44 if you have any security related questions or concerns