Snowflakes are a form of unique identifier devised by X/Twitter and are used by many companies, including Instagram and Discord, to generate unique IDs for their entities.
Some of the benefits of using Snowflakes (over alternatives such as UUID/ULID) include:
- Timestamp Component: Extract creation time directly from the ID.
- Uniqueness Across Distributed Systems: Ensures unique IDs without coordination.
- Orderability: Roughly ordered by creation time for easy sorting.
- Compactness: 64-bit size, more compact than 128-bit UUIDs.
- Performance: Faster and less resource-intensive generation.
- Configurability: Flexible bit allocation for specific needs.
- Storage Efficiency: More efficient storage compared to larger identifiers.
- Database Indexing: Faster indexing and query performance.
- Human Readability: More compact and readable than longer identifiers.
First pull in the package using Composer:
composer require calebdw/laraflakeAnd then publish the package's configuration file:
php artisan vendor:publish --provider="CalebDW\Laraflake\ServiceProvider"The Snowflake type determines the class used to generate Snowflakes.
The default Snowflake type is Godruoyi\Snowflake\Snowflake which uses 41 bits for the epoch, 5 bits for the data center ID, 5 bits for the worker ID, and 12 bits for the sequence.
This allows for up to 1024 workers and 4096 unique IDs per worker per millisecond.
You can change the Snowflake type to Godruoyi\Snowflake\Sonyflake which uses 39 bits for the epoch, 16 bits for the machine ID, and 8 bits for the sequence.
This allows for up to 65535 machines and 256 unique IDs per worker per 10 milliseconds.
The timestamp encoded in the Snowflake is the difference between the time of creation and a given starting epoch/timestamp. Snowflakes use 41 bits and can generate IDs for up to 69 years past the given epoch. Sonyflakes use 39 bits and can generate IDs for up to 174 years past the given epoch.
In most cases you should set this value to the current date using a format of YYYY-MM-DD.
Note: Future dates will throw an error and you should avoid using a date far in the past (such as the Unix epoch
1970-01-01) as that may reduce the number of years for which you can generate timestamps.
Note: This is only used for the
Snowflaketype.
You can set the data center and worker IDs that the application should use when generating Snowflakes.
These are used to ensure that each worker generates unique Snowflakes and can range from 0 to 31 (up to 1024 unique workers).
Note: This is only used for the
Sonyflaketype.
You can set the machine ID that the application should use when generating Sonyflakes.
This is used to ensure that each machine generates unique Sonyflakes and can range from 0 to 65535.
WARNING: Do not create new instances of the Snowflake generator (as this could cause collisions), always use the Snowflake singleton from the container.
You can generate a Snowflake by resolving the singleton from the container and calling its id method:
use Godruoyi\Snowflake\Snowflake;
resolve('snowflake')->id(); // (string) "5585066784854016"
resolve(Snowflake::class)->id(); // (string) "5585066784854016"This package also provides a snowflake helper function, a Snowflake facade, and a Str::snowflakeId macro for convenience:
use CalebDW\Laraflake\Facades\Snowflake;
use Illuminate\Support\Str;
snowflake()->id(); // (string) "5585066784854016"
Snowflake::id(); // (string) "5585066784854016"
Str::snowflakeId(); // (string) "5585066784854016"This package provides a set of migration macros to make it easier to work with Snowflakes in your database schema.
Here's an example:
return new class extends Migration
{
public function up(): void
{
Schema::create('comments', function(Blueprint $table) {
$table->snowflake()->primary();
$table->foreignSnowflake('user_id')->constrained()->cascadeOnDelete();
$table->foreignSnowflakeFor(Post::class)->constrained();
});
}
}Next, add the package's HasSnowflakes trait to your Eloquent models:
namespace App\Models;
use CalebDW\Laraflake\Concerns\HasSnowflakes;
class Post extends Model
{
use HasSnowflakes;
}The trait provides several features for the model's Snowflake columns:
- the generation of Snowflakes for new records
- route model binding
- automatic casting from database integers to strings which prevents truncation in languages that do not support 64-bit integers (such as JavaScript).
By default, the trait assumes that the model's primary key is a Snowflake.
If you have other unique columns that should be treated as Snowflakes, you can override the uniqueIds method to specify them:
namespace App\Models;
use CalebDW\Laraflake\Concerns\HasSnowflakes;
class Post extends Model
{
use HasSnowflakes;
/** @inheritDoc */
public function uniqueIds(): array
{
return [$this->getKeyName(), 'slug'];
}
}If necessary, you can explicitly cast the model's Snowflake columns using the AsSnowflake cast:
namespace App\Models;
use CalebDW\Laraflake\Casts\AsSnowflake;
use CalebDW\Laraflake\Concerns\HasSnowflakes;
class Post extends Model
{
use HasSnowflakes;
protected $casts = [
'id' => AsSnowflake::class,
'user_id' => AsSnowflake::class,
];
}If you need to validate Snowflakes in your application, you can use the Snowflake rule or the Rule::snowflake macro provided by this package:
use CalebDW\Laraflake\Rules\Snowflake;
use Illuminate\Validation\Rule;
$request->validate([
'id' => ['required', new Snowflake()],
'user_id' => ['required', Rule::snowflake()],
]);You can also just use the Str::isSnowflake macro to check if a value is a valid Snowflake:
use Illuminate\Support\Str;
Str::isSnowflake('5585066784854016'); // (bool) trueThe sequence resolver is responsible for generating the sequence component of the Snowflake to ensure that numbers generated on the same machine within the same millisecond are unique.
By default, if the application has a cache, then it uses the LaravelSequenceResolver
which uses the Laravel cache to store the last sequence number.
If the application does not have a cache, then it uses the RandomSequenceResolver which
has no dependencies but is not concurrency-safe.
You can override the sequence resolver by binding your own implementation in a service provider:
use Godruoyi\Snowflake\SequenceResolver;
use Illuminate\Support\ServiceProvider;
class AppServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
{
public function register(): void
{
$this->app->bind(SequenceResolver::class, function() {
return new MySequenceResolver();
});
}
}Please see godruoyi/php-snowflake for more information on the available sequence resolvers and their dependencies.
Thank you for considering contributing! You can read the contribution guide here.
Laraflake is open-sourced software licensed under the MIT license.
Derived from caneara/snowflake which is no longer maintained. The actual Snowflake generation is handled by the excellent godruoyi/php-snowflake library.