Type-safe, K-sortable, globally unique identifier inspired by Stripe IDs

A type-safe, K-sortable, globally unique identifier inspired by Stripe IDs

What is it?

TypeIDs are a modern, type-safe extension of UUIDv7.

TypeIDs are canonically encoded as lowercase strings consisting of three parts:

1. A type prefix
2. An underscore ‘_’ separator
3. A 128-bit UUIDv7 encoded as a 26-character string in base32 (using Crockford’s alphabet in lowercase).

Here’s an example of a TypeID of type user:

  user_2x4y6z8a0b1c2d3e4f5g6h7j8k
  └──┘ └────────────────────────┘
  type    uuid suffix (base32)

Benefits

• Type-safe: you can’t accidentally use a user ID where a post ID is expected. When debugging, you can
  immediately understand what type of entity a TypeID refers to thanks to the type prefix.
• Compatible with UUIDs: TypeIDs are a superset of UUIDs. They are based on the upcoming UUIDv7 standard. If you decode the TypeID and remove the type information, you get a valid UUIDv7.
• K-Sortable: TypeIDs are K-sortable and can be used as the primary key in a database while ensuring good
  locality. Compare to entirely random global ids, like UUIDv4, that generally suffer from poor database locality.
• Thoughtful encoding: the base32 encoding is URL safe, case-insensitive, avoids ambiguous characters, can be
  selected for copy-pasting by double-clicking, and is a more compact encoding than the traditional hex encoding used by UUIDs (26 characters vs 36 characters).

Implementations

We are looking for community contributions to implement TypeIDs in other languages.

Command-line Tool

This repo includes a command-line tool for generating TypeIDs. To install it, run:

curl -fsSL https://get.jetpack.io/typeid | bash

To generate a new TypeID, run:

$ typeid new prefix
prefix_01h2xcejqtf2nbrexx3vqjhp41

To decode an existing TypeID into a UUID run:

$ typeid decode prefix_01h2xcejqtf2nbrexx3vqjhp41
type: prefix
uuid: 0188bac7-4afa-78aa-bc3b-bd1eef28d881

And to encode an existing UUID into a TypeID run:

$ typeid encode prefix 0188bac7-4afa-78aa-bc3b-bd1eef28d881
prefix_01h2xcejqtf2nbrexx3vqjhp41

Related Work

• UUIDv7 – The upcoming UUID standard that TypeIDs are based on.

Alternatives to UUIDv7 that are also worth considering (but not type-safe like TypeIDs):

• xid
• ulid
• ksuid