rust-petname

Generate human readable random names.

Petnames are useful when you need to name a large number of resources – like servers, services, perhaps bicycles for hire – and you want those names to be easy to recall and communicate unambiguously. For example, over a telephone compare saying "please restart remarkably-striking-cricket" with "please restart s01O97i4": the former is easier to say and less likely to be misunderstood. Avoiding sequential names adds confidence too: petnames have a greater lexical distance between them, so errors in transcription can be more readily detected.

This crate is both a command-line tool and a Rust library. Dustin Kirkland's petname project is the inspiration for this project. The word lists and the basic command-line UX here are taken from there. Check it out! Dustin maintains packages for Python, and Golang too.

Notable features:

• Choose from 3 built-in word lists, or provide your own.
• Alliterative names, like viable-vulture, proper-pony, ...
• Build names with 1-255 components (adjectives, adverbs, nouns).
• Name components can be unseparated, or joined by any character or string.
• Generate 1..n names, or stream names continuously.
• no_std support (see later section).
• Compile without built-in dictionaries to reduce library/binary size.

Command-line utility

If you have installed Cargo, you can install rust-petname with cargo install petname. This puts a petname binary in ~/.cargo/bin, which the Cargo installation process will probably have added to your PATH.

The petname binary from rust-petname is drop-in compatible with the original petname. It's more strict when validating arguments, but for most uses it should behave the same.

$ petname --help
rust-petname
Gavin Panella <gavinpanella@gmail.com>
Generate human readable random names

USAGE:
    petname [OPTIONS]

OPTIONS:
    -a, --alliterate                  Generate names where each word begins with the same letter
    -A, --alliterate-with <LETTER>    Generate names where each word begins with the given letter
    -c, --complexity <COM>            Use small words (0), medium words (1), or large words (2)
                                      [default: 0]
        --count <COUNT>               Generate multiple names; pass 0 to produce infinite names
                                      (--count=0 is deprecated; use --stream instead) [default: 1]
    -d, --dir <DIR>                   Directory containing adjectives.txt, adverbs.txt, names.txt
    -h, --help                        Print help information
    -l, --letters <LETTERS>           Maximum number of letters in each word; 0 for unlimited
                                      [default: 0]
        --non-repeating               Do not generate the same name more than once
    -s, --separator <SEP>             Separator between words [default: -]
        --stream                      Stream names continuously
    -u, --ubuntu                      Alias; see --alliterate
    -w, --words <WORDS>               Number of words in name [default: 2]

Based on Dustin Kirkland's petname project <https://github.com/dustinkirkland/petname>.

$ petname
untaunting-paxton

$ petname -s _ -w 3
suitably_overdelicate_jamee

Performance

This implementation is considerably faster than the upstream petname:

$ time /usr/bin/petname
fit-lark

real    0m0.038s
user    0m0.032s
sys     0m0.008s

$ time target/release/petname
cool-guinea

real    0m0.002s
user    0m0.002s
sys     0m0.000s

These timings are irrelevant if you only need to name a single thing, but if you need to generate 100s or 1000s of names then rust-petname is handy:

$ time { for i in $(seq 1000); do /usr/bin/petname; done; } > /dev/null

real    0m32.058s
user    0m29.360s
sys     0m5.163s

$ time { for i in $(seq 1000); do target/release/petname; done; } > /dev/null

real    0m2.199s
user    0m1.333s
sys     0m0.987s

To be fair, /usr/bin/petname is a shell script. The Go command-line version (available from the golang-petname package on Ubuntu) is comparable to the Rust version for speed, but has very limited options compared to its shell-script ancestor and to rust-petname.

Lastly, rust-petname has a --count option that speeds up generation of names considerably:

$ time target/release/petname --count=10000000 > /dev/null

real    0m1.327s
user    0m1.322s
sys     0m0.004s

That's ~240,000 (two hundred and forty thousand) times faster, for about 7.5 million petnames a second on this hardware. This is useful if you want to apply an external filter to the names being generated:

$ petname --words=3 --stream | grep 'love.*\bsalmon$'

Features & no_std support

There are a few features that can be selected – or, more correctly, deselected, since all features are enabled by default:

• std_rng enables std and std_rng in rand.
• default_dictionary enables the default word lists.
• clap enables the clap command-line argument parser.

All of these are required to build the command-line utility.

However, the library can be built without any default features, and it will work in a no_std environment, like Wasm. You'll need to figure out a source of randomness, but SmallRng::seed_from_u64 may be a good starting point.

Getting Started

To install the command-line tool:

• Install Cargo,
• Install this crate: cargo install petname.

Alternatively, to hack the source:

• Install Cargo,
• Clone this repository,
• Build it: cargo build.

Running the tests

After installing the source (see above) run tests with: cargo test.

Making a release

1. Bump version in Cargo.toml.
2. Paste updated --help output into README.md (this file; see near the top). On macOS the command cargo run -- --help | pbcopy is helpful.
3. Build and test: cargo build && cargo test. The latter on its own does do a build, but a test build can hide warnings about dead code, so do both.
4. Commit with message "Bump version to $VERSION."
5. Tag with "v$VERSION", e.g. git tag v1.0.10.
6. Push: git push --tags.
7. Publish: cargo publish.

License

This project is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. See the LICENSE file for details.