short-uuid VS nanoid

> The dash-separated hexadecimal format takes 36 characters to represent 16 bytes of data.

You can use a different formatting. I would suggest looking at https://github.com/oculus42/short-uuid Of course if you just want a random ID, then you might not need a UUID. But UUIDs have the advantage that there are different versions and you can distinguish them; e.g. you might want a unique ID that gives you some debugging information (where/when was it created), so you use v1 and later you can decide to switch to v4 if decide you want the IDs to carry no information.

Indepedent of how you generate the ID, I think the base-57 encoding that shortUUIDs use is quite good when the IDs are user facing. Not using O,0,l,1,I in the alphabet makes IDs more readable.

Some popular npm packages for generating UUIDs in JavaScript are the uuid and short-uuid packages.

Last thing left is to use our new upload function in our server action. Since I like to upload images in single format and have some more control over them, I will additionally use sharp library. For file name, I'll generate some random string using nanoid:

Our API is in node. And God, how I suffered to import nanoid in an esmodule project. I had to vendor it, since using a previous version was not ideal. With bun, we can no longer worry about that. Just import what you need and done.

No thread about UUID is complete without a plug for NanoID! https://github.com/ai/nanoid/blob/main/README.md

Generate a unique file name using the nanoid library.

The syntax should read similar to SQL itself. We’re using a Python port of nanoid to generate our IDs. There’s only one thing missing… how do we actually create the table?

I usually go for Nano Id for new projects https://github.com/ai/nanoid

Nano ID

In another comment I mentioned I use nanoid in my projects now. It has a default space of 64^21 and has an a page where you can play with key lengths and alphabet sizes and see the probability of collisions :

https://zelark.github.io/nano-id-cc/

At the default 64 character alphabet with a 21 character key length it would take ~41 million years in order to have a 1% probability of at least one collision if you generated 1000 ids per second.

Using randomly generated IDs like Nano ID could be a good alternative, however, as a developer, we must understand what Nano ID really does in our application. Defining the number of characters in the generated IDs is also important, to help with that Nano ID has a Collision Calculator to give us how many years in order to have a 1% probability of collision.