Snowflakes

Snowflakes is a Ruby gem that provides:

• A simple 128-bit id generator.
• Methods to convert snowflakes ID into string

Snowflakes produces 128-bit and time-ordered ids. They run one on each node in infrastructure and will generate conflict-free ids on-demand without coordination.

The project is inspired by Twitter's Snowflake and Go implementation of Discord but extended to 128-bit and not compatible with Twitter's Snowflake. This library provides a basis for id generation but not a service for handing out ids nor node id coordination.

Getting Started

Installation

gem install snowflakes

Or via bundler:

source 'https://rubygems.org'

gem 'snowflakes'

Usage

node = Snowflakes::Node.new(ENV['SNOWFLAKE_ID'])

some_id = node.next.to_hex

Format

Snowflakes ids are 128-bits wide described here from most significant to least significant bits:

• timestamp (64-bit) - milliseconds since the epoch (Jan 1 1970)
• node id(48-bit) - a configurable node id
• sequence (16-bit) - usually 0, increasing when more than one request in the same millisecond and reset to 0 when clock ticks forward

System Clock Dependency

You should use NTP to keep your system clock accurate. Snowflakes holds requests when non-monotonic clock detected. To run in a mode where NTP not move the clock backwards, see http://wiki.dovecot.org/TimeMovedBackwards#Time_synchronization for tips on how to do this.

Related Projects

• progamesigner/snowflakes-php

Maintainers

@progamesigner.

Contribute

1. Fork the repo on GitHub
2. Clone the project to your own machine
3. Commit changes to your own branch
4. Push your work back up to your fork
5. Submit a Pull request so that I can review your changes

License

MIT © Yang Sheng Han