Short UID Generator

Short, URL-safe unique identifier generator.

Overview

VCollab applications frequently need short, unique identifiers for temporary file names, directory names, session IDs, or other scenarios where brief, collision-resistant strings are needed.

The vcti-short-uid package provides ShortUID — a generator that produces a random identifier of an exact length from the URL-safe base64 alphabet [A-Za-z0-9_-], backed by secrets.token_urlsafe.

This package has zero external dependencies.

When to use it

ShortUID gives you a short, URL-safe identifier of an exact length in a single call — handy for temporary file and directory names, cache keys, or session tags. It is not a secrets generator: outputs are short and, at small lengths, guessable. For unguessable tokens use secrets.token_urlsafe() directly, and for a standard 128-bit identifier use uuid.uuid4(). See the full comparison.

Installation

pip install vcti-short-uid

In requirements.txt

vcti-short-uid>=2.0.0

In pyproject.toml dependencies

dependencies = [
    "vcti-short-uid>=2.0.0",
]

Quick Start

from vcti.shortuid import ShortUID

# One-shot generation (no instance needed)
uid = ShortUID.quick()               # e.g. "a3Bx9kLm"

# Custom length
long_uid = ShortUID.quick(length=16) # 16-char ID

# Reusable generator
gen = ShortUID(length=8)
uid1 = gen.generate()
uid2 = gen.generate()

Public API

ShortUID(length=8)

Create a generator instance.

Parameter Type Default Description
length int 8 Exact number of characters in generated IDs (minimum 1, no upper cap)

Raises:

  • TypeError -- if length is not an integer.
  • ValueError -- if length is less than 1.

ShortUID.generate() -> str

Generate a short, URL-safe identifier of exactly length characters, drawn from [A-Za-z0-9_-].

ShortUID.quick(length=8) -> str (classmethod)

Convenience one-liner -- creates a temporary instance and generates one ID.

repr(ShortUID(...))

Returns a string like ShortUID(length=8) for debugging.

Dependencies

None. Standard library only (math, secrets).

Documentation

If you want to… Read
Get started using the package Quick Start above
Understand the architecture and design decisions docs/design.md
Navigate and understand the source docs/source-guide.md
Look up a specific function or type docs/api.md
See the release history CHANGELOG.md

Project links

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Credits

Author: Visual Collaboration Technologies Inc.

GitHub Statistics

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License expression

LicenseRef-Proprietary
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Requires

Python <3.15, >=3.12

Provides Extra

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Classifiers

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