Nano ID

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A tiny, secure, URL-friendly, unique string ID generator for JavaScript.

“An amazing level of senseless perfectionism, which is simply impossible not to respect.”

• Small. 117 bytes (minified and brotlied). No dependencies. Size Limit controls the size.
• Fast. Faster than native crypto.randomUUID().
• Safe. It uses hardware random generator. Can be used in clusters.
• Short IDs. It uses a larger alphabet than UUID (A-Za-z0-9_-). So ID size was reduced from 36 to 21 symbols.
• Portable. Nano ID was ported to over 20 programming languages.

import { nanoid } from 'nanoid'
model.id = nanoid() //=> "V1StGXR8_Z5jdHi6B-myT"

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  Nano ID is built by Evil Martians, an American design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups.

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Table of Contents

• Table of Contents
• Comparison with UUID
• Benchmark
• Security
• Install
  • CDN
• API
  • Custom Alphabet or Size
  • Custom Random Bytes Generator
  • Non-Secure
• Usage
  • React
  • React Native
  • PouchDB and CouchDB
  • CLI
  • TypeScript
  • Other Programming Languages
• Tools

Comparison with UUID

Nano ID is quite comparable to UUID v4 (random-based). It has a similar number of random bits in the ID (126 in Nano ID and 122 in UUID), so it has a similar collision probability:

For there to be a one in a billion chance of duplication, 103 trillion version 4 IDs must be generated.

There are two main differences between Nano ID and UUID v4:

1. Nano ID uses a bigger alphabet, so a similar number of random bits are packed in just 21 symbols instead of 36.
2. Nano ID is faster than crypto.randomUUID and uuid/v4.

Benchmark

$ node ./test/benchmark.js
nope-id                 50,866,431 ops/sec
nanoid                  25,580,859 ops/sec
customAlphabet           3,955,574 ops/sec
crypto.randomUUID        6,583,303 ops/sec
uuid v4                  5,575,055 ops/sec
@napi-rs/uuid            8,369,981 ops/sec
uid/secure               7,965,602 ops/sec
@lukeed/uuid             6,301,692 ops/sec
nanoid for browser         626,943 ops/sec
secure-random-string       509,515 ops/sec
uid-safe.sync              491,164 ops/sec

Non-secure:
uid                     34,793,413 ops/sec
nanoid/non-secure        2,717,308 ops/sec
rndm                     2,779,850 ops/sec

Security

See a good article about random generators theory: Secure random values (in Node.js)

• Unpredictability. Instead of using the unsafe Math.random(), Nano ID uses the crypto module in Node.js and the Web Crypto API in browsers. These modules use unpredictable hardware random generator.

• Uniformity. random % alphabet is a popular mistake to make when coding an ID generator. The distribution will not be even; there will be a lower chance for some symbols to appear compared to others. So, it will reduce the number of tries when brute-forcing. Nano ID uses a better algorithm and is tested for uniformity.

  

• Well-documented: all Nano ID hacks are documented. See comments in the source.

• Vulnerabilities: to report a security vulnerability, please use the Tidelift security contact. Tidelift will coordinate the fix and disclosure.

Install

npm install nanoid

CDN

For quick hacks, you can load Nano ID from CDN. Though, it is not recommended to be used in production because of the lower loading performance.

import { nanoid } from 'https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/nanoid/nanoid.js'

API

By default, Nano ID uses URL-friendly symbols (A-Za-z0-9_-) and returns an ID with 21 characters (to have a collision probability similar to UUID v4).

import { nanoid } from 'nanoid'
model.id = nanoid() //=> "V1StGXR8_Z5jdHi6B-myT"

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

nanoid(10) //=> "IRFa-VaY2b"

Don’t forget to check the safety of your ID size in our ID collision probability calculator.

You can also use a custom alphabet or a random generator.

Custom Alphabet or Size

customAlphabet returns a function that allows you to create nanoid with your own alphabet and ID size.

import { customAlphabet } from 'nanoid'
const nanoid = customAlphabet('1234567890abcdef', 10)
model.id = nanoid() //=> "4f90d13a42"

import { customAlphabet } from 'nanoid/non-secure'
const nanoid = customAlphabet('1234567890abcdef', 10)
user.id = nanoid()

Check the safety of your custom alphabet and ID size in our ID collision probability calculator. For more alphabets, check out the options in nanoid-dictionary.

Alphabet must contain from 1 to 256 symbols. Otherwise, the security of the internal generator algorithm is not guaranteed, and a generator built from an empty or over-256-symbol alphabet can loop forever instead of returning an ID.

In addition to setting a default size, you can change the ID size when calling the function:

import { customAlphabet } from 'nanoid'
const nanoid = customAlphabet('1234567890abcdef', 10)
model.id = nanoid(5) //=> "f01a2"

Custom Random Bytes Generator

customRandom allows you to create a nanoid and replace alphabet and the default random bytes generator.

In this example, a seed-based generator is used:

import { customRandom } from 'nanoid'

const rng = seedrandom(seed)
const nanoid = customRandom('abcdef', 10, size => {
  return new Uint8Array(size).map(() => 256 * rng())
})

nanoid() //=> "fbaefaadeb"

random callback must accept the array size and return an array with random numbers.

If you want to use the same URL-friendly symbols with customRandom, you can get the default alphabet using the urlAlphabet.

import { customRandom, urlAlphabet } from 'nanoid'
const nanoid = customRandom(urlAlphabet, 10, random)

Note, that between Nano ID versions we may change random generator call sequence. If you are using seed-based generators, we do not guarantee the same result.

Non-Secure

Nano ID uses hardware random bytes generation for security and low collision probability. If you are not so concerned with security, you can use it for environments without hardware random generators.

import { nanoid } from 'nanoid/non-secure'
const id = nanoid() //=> "Uakgb_J5m9g-0JDMbcJqLJ"

Note, that non-secure version is slower than secure. Use it only if you have to.

Usage

React

There’s no correct way to use Nano ID for React key prop since it should be consistent among renders.

function Todos({ todos }) {
  return (
    <ul>
      {todos.map(todo => (
        <li key={nanoid()}>
          {' '}
          /* DON’T DO IT */
          {todo.text}
        </li>
      ))}
    </ul>
  )
}

You should rather try to reach for stable ID inside your list item.

const todoItems = todos.map(todo => <li key={todo.id}>{todo.text}</li>)

In case you don’t have stable IDs you'd rather use index as key instead of nanoid():

const todoItems = todos.map((text, index) => (
  <li key={index}>
    {' '}
    /* Still not recommended but preferred over nanoid(). Only do this if items
    have no stable IDs. */
    {text}
  </li>
))

In case you just need random IDs to link elements like labels and input fields together, useId is recommended. That hook was added in React 18.

React Native

React Native does not have built-in random generator. The following polyfill works for plain React Native and Expo starting with 39.x.

1. Check react-native-get-random-values docs and install it.
2. Import it before Nano ID.

import 'react-native-get-random-values'

import { nanoid } from 'nanoid'

PouchDB and CouchDB

In PouchDB and CouchDB, IDs can’t start with an underscore _. A prefix is required to prevent this issue, as Nano ID might use a _ at the start of the ID by default.

Override the default ID with the following option:

db.put({
  _id: 'id' + nanoid(),
  …
})

CLI

You can get unique ID in terminal by calling npx nanoid. You need only Node.js in the system. You do not need Nano ID to be installed anywhere.

$ npx nanoid
npx: installed 1 in 0.63s
LZfXLFzPPR4NNrgjlWDxn

Size of generated ID can be specified with --size (or -s) option:

$ npx nanoid --size 10
L3til0JS4z

Custom alphabet can be specified with --alphabet (or -a) option (note that in this case --size is required):

$ npx nanoid --alphabet abc --size 15
bccbcabaabaccab

TypeScript

Nano ID allows casting generated strings into opaque strings in TypeScript. For example:

declare const userIdBrand: unique symbol
type UserId = string & { [userIdBrand]: true }

// Use explicit type parameter:
mockUser(nanoid<UserId>())

interface User {
  id: UserId
  name: string
}

const user: User = {
  // Automatically casts to UserId:
  id: nanoid(),
  name: 'Alice'
}

Other Programming Languages

Nano ID was ported to many languages. You can use these ports to have the same ID generator on the client and server side.

• C
• C#
• C++
• Clojure and ClojureScript
• ColdFusion/CFML
• Crystal
• Dart & Flutter
• Elixir
• Gleam
• Go
• Haskell
• Haxe
• Janet
• Java
• Kotlin
• MySQL/MariaDB
• Nim
• OCaml
• Perl
• PHP
• Python native implementation with dictionaries and fast implementation (written in Rust)
• Postgres Extension and Native Function
• R (with dictionaries)
• Ruby
• Rust
• Swift
• Unison
• V
• Zig

For other environments, CLI is available to generate IDs from a command line.

Tools

• ID size calculator shows collision probability when adjusting the ID alphabet or size.
• nanoid-dictionary with popular alphabets to use with customAlphabet.
• nanoid-good to be sure that your ID doesn’t contain any obscene words.