Snowflakey

Unique ID generator.

Generation

You can generate a simple snowflake by calling #generate without any arguments. This will return a snowflake instance. You can then call #to_s or let your framework do that for you.

Snowflakey.generate.to_s # => "567wz82coauesrlb522"

You can also pass a prefix that will be prepended to the snowflake.

Snowflakey.generate("snow").to_s # => "snow_567wz9ox8b8p58tngzu"

Finally it also works with multiple prefixes.

Snowflakey.generate(["snow", "flake"]).to_s # => "snow_flake_567wz6ecywb6d6ruor9"

You can also change the size of the snowflake.

Snowflakey.generate("snow", size: 64).to_s # => "snow_2mdov6imct3o4"

You can also use another base.

Snowflakey.generate("snow", base: 16).to_s # => "snow_ac6591aa22063660af0e05d4"

Verification

snowflake = Snowflakey.verify("snow_567z7pfvdq47fswkt52")

This will return the snowflake from which you can fetch the size, the time, the ID, the base, etc.

Note that if the snowflake was created with another base than 36 and with another size than 96 you will have to declare those when calling #verify.

Manual Initialization

If you need you can also initialize a snowflake without using the #generate method. This gives you more control over every parameters.

prefix = "snow"
size   = 96
time   = Time.parse("2016-12-04T22:22:22Z").utc
id     = 3104654282887302
base   = 36

snowflake = Snowflakey::Snowflake.new(prefix, size, time, id, base)

You can then call #to_s to get the snowflake as a string.

snowflake.to_s # => "snow_567z7pfvdq47fswkt52"

Important Remark

You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world.