short-id

A tiny Rust library for generating short, URL-safe, unique identifiers.

What is this?

Unlike full UUIDs (which are 36 characters and include hyphens), short-id gives you compact 14-character strings that are easy to copy, paste, and use in URLs.

This library has two main goals:

Make it very easy to generate short random IDs for things like request IDs, user-facing tokens, test data, and log correlation.
Provide an optional "ordered" variant where IDs include a timestamp prefix, so when you sort them as strings they roughly follow creation time.

It is intentionally minimal - no configuration, no custom alphabets, no complex API. You just call:

short_id() for a random URL-safe ID
short_id_ordered() for a URL-safe ID that is roughly time-ordered

This crate is for you if you want something simpler and shorter than UUIDs, and you don't need strict UUID semantics or reversibility.

Quick Start

use short_id::short_id;

// Generate a random ID
let id = short_id();
println!("Request ID: {}", id);
// Example output: "X7K9mP2nQwE-Tg"

Installation

Add this to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]

short-id = "0.1"

Usage

Random IDs

Perfect for request IDs, session tokens, or any unique identifier:

use short_id::short_id;

let request_id = short_id();
let session_id = short_id();
let token = short_id();

// Each ID is 14 characters, URL-safe, and unique
assert_eq!(request_id.len(), 14);

Time-Ordered IDs

For IDs that roughly sort by creation time:

use short_id::short_id_ordered;

let id1 = short_id_ordered();
std::thread::sleep(std::time::Duration::from_secs(1));
let id2 = short_id_ordered();

// IDs sort chronologically
assert!(id1 < id2);

This is useful for:

Log entries that should sort by time
Event IDs in chronological order
Resource IDs where temporal order matters

API

`short_id()`

Generates a random 10-byte ID encoded with base64url (14 characters).

Always exactly 14 characters
URL-safe characters only: A-Z, a-z, 0-9, -, _
Cryptographically secure random
Works in both std and no_std (with alloc)

`short_id_ordered()`

Generates an ID with a timestamp prefix (4 bytes) plus random bytes (6 bytes), base64url-encoded to 14 characters.

Includes Unix timestamp, so IDs roughly sort by creation time
Still cryptographically unique due to random component
Requires the std feature (enabled by default)

`no_std` Support

This crate works in no_std environments with alloc:

[dependencies]

short-id = { version = "0.1", default-features = false }

Note: In no_std mode, only short_id() is available. The short_id_ordered() function requires the std feature because it needs std::time::SystemTime.

License

MIT

short-id 0.1.0