sparkid

Fast, monotonic, time-sortable, 22-char Base58 unique ID generator. Zero dependencies.

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Available for JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, and Rust.

Why sparkid?

	sparkid	UUID v4	UUID v7	nanoid	ULID
Length	22	36	36	21	26
Sortable	Yes	No	Yes	No	Yes
Monotonic	Yes	No	No	No	No
URL-safe	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes
Alphabet	Base58	Hex	Hex	URL-safe	Crockford32

sparkid gives you compact, readable IDs that sort by creation time and are strictly monotonically increasing — no two IDs from the same generator will ever compare equal or out of order.

How it works

Each ID is 22 characters built from three parts:

[8-char timestamp][6-char counter][8-char random]

• Timestamp — current millisecond, Base58-encoded. IDs from a later millisecond always sort after earlier ones.
• Counter — randomly seeded each new millisecond, then incremented for each ID within that millisecond. Guarantees strict monotonic ordering even at high throughput.
• Random — 8 characters of cryptographically secure randomness per ID, rejection-sampled to avoid modulo bias. Provides ~58^14 (~1.8 x 10^24) combinations per millisecond for collision resistance.

The Base58 alphabet (123456789ABC...xyz) excludes visually ambiguous characters (0, O, I, l), making IDs safe to copy, paste, and read aloud.

JavaScript

npm install sparkid

import { generateId } from "sparkid";

const id = generateId();

~22 million IDs/sec on Node.js. Works in Node >= 19, browsers, Deno, Bun, and Cloudflare Workers.

All IDs from generateId() are strictly monotonically increasing within the process. Since JavaScript is single-threaded, this means process-wide ordering with no coordination needed.

See js/README.md for full documentation.

Python

pip install sparkid

from sparkid import generate_id

id = generate_id()

~3 million IDs/sec on Python 3.14. Thread-safe via threading.local (one generator per thread). Fork-safe via os.register_at_fork.

IDs from a single thread are strictly monotonically increasing. Across threads, IDs are unique but unordered. For process-wide monotonic ordering, wrap an IdGenerator in a lock — see python/README.md for details.

Rust

cargo add sparkid

use sparkid::SparkId;

let id = SparkId::new();

~27 million IDs/sec. SparkId is a stack-allocated, Copy type — no heap allocation. Thread-safe via thread_local! (one generator per thread). Only dependency is rand (userspace CSPRNG).

IDs from a single thread are strictly monotonically increasing. Across threads, IDs are unique but unordered. For manual control, use IdGenerator directly — see rust/README.md for details.

License

MIT