Installation

You can install libuuid either via the Python Package Index (PyPI) or from source.

To install using pip:

$ pip install libuuid

To install using easy_install:

$ easy_install libuuid

If you have downloaded a source tarball you can install it by doing the following,:

$ python setup.py build
# python setup.py install # as root

Usage / Examples

The libuuid module provides a similar interface to uuid, resulting in fully compatible UUID objects. libuuid.UUID is also a subclass of uuid.UUID, so existing code using isinstance will continue to work.

>>> import libuuid
>>> libuuid.uuid1()
UUID('a3a32410-940a-11df-8ead-002219990fd7')

>>> libuuid.uuid4()
UUID('85651a1f-118f-480d-a116-526b2dd37322')

Furthermore, libuuid has a few extra utility functions not available in uuid. These are handy when you don’t need a “full” UUID object, but just need the byte representation. The _bytes functions have less overhead than the common interface.

>>> libuuid.uuid1_bytes()
'\x05f\xe1d\x94\x0b\x11\xdf\x8e\xad\x00"\x19\x99\x0f\xd7'

>>> libuuid.uuid4_bytes()
'\x05f\xe1d\x94\x0b\x11\xdf\x8e\xad\x00"\x19\x99\x0f\xd7'

Gotchas

• libuuid only provides random (version 4) and time based (version 1) UUIDs.

• Calling libuuid.uuid1 with node or clock_seq is not supported, and will silently fall back to the uuid.UUID implementation for compatibility.

• Only tested on Linux. It should work on any platform, but e2fsprogs is probably just readily available on Linux distributions.

Bug tracker

If you have any suggestions, bug reports or annoyances please report using the Github issue tracker

Contributing

Development takes place at Github: http://github.com/brandond/python-libuuid/

Patches and contributions are more than welcome.

License

This software is licensed under the BSD software license. See the LICENSE file in the top distribution directory for full license text.