nanoid.cr

Crystal implementation of original NanoID

Installation

Add this to your application's shard.yml:

dependencies:
  nanoid:
    github: mamantoha/nanoid.cr

Usage

require "nanoid"

Nanoid.generate uses URL-friendly symbols (A-Za-z0-9_-) and returns an ID with 21 characters.

Nanoid.generate
# => 3gFI8yZxcfXsXGhB0036l

If you want to reduce ID length (and increase collisions probability), you can pass the length as an argument.

Nanoid.generate(size: 8, alphabet: "1234567890abcdef")
# => 86984b57

Non-secure API is also available.

Nanoid.generate(secure: false)
# => no0MmiInNcBm9jR2_3sGt

Nanoid.generate(size: 10, alphabet: "1234567890abcdef", secure: false)
# => 2793b2351c

Benchmark

crystal run --release ./bench/benchmark.cr

Crystal 1.16.2 (2025-04-29)

LLVM: 20.1.4
Default target: aarch64-apple-darwin24.5.0

    Nanoid.simple_generate(21)   3.94  (253.59ms) (± 0.63%)  76.3MB/op   3.51× slower
   Nanoid.complex_generate(21)   3.42  (292.32ms) (± 1.27%)  91.6MB/op   4.05× slower
Nanoid.non_secure_generate(21)  13.85  ( 72.22ms) (± 1.32%)  45.8MB/op        fastest
                       UUID v4   3.87  (258.36ms) (± 0.79%)   168MB/op   3.58× slower
    Nanoid.simple_generate(36)   3.55  (281.52ms) (± 0.58%)   107MB/op   2.28× slower
   Nanoid.complex_generate(36)   3.06  (327.20ms) (± 0.74%)   122MB/op   2.65× slower
Nanoid.non_secure_generate(36)   8.11  (123.26ms) (± 2.13%)  61.0MB/op        fastest
                       UUID v4   3.84  (260.71ms) (± 3.38%)   168MB/op   2.12× slower

Development

Clone this repository and install dependencies:

shards install

Run tests:

crystal spec

Contributing

1. Fork it (https://github.com/mamantoha/nanoid.cr/fork)
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request

Contributors

• mamantoha Anton Maminov - creator, maintainer

License

Copyright: 2018-2025 Anton Maminov (anton.maminov@gmail.com)

This library is distributed under the MIT license. Please see the LICENSE file.