Matt Trask has put together a new post spotlighting a handy library that's widely used across the PHP ecosystem for generating UUIDs: ramsey/uuid.

Welcome to the first installment in my 2113918230981 part series, "Better know a Package!". Tonight's package: the famous/infamous Uuid package that that taught us all what Ramsey is in Scottish, Rhumsaa. Created to give PHP a library to generate Universal Unique Identifiers, this library has been a stallwort in the community. Ben Ramsey created it first under the Rhumsaa namesapce before moving it to the Ramsey namespace, saving us all from learning more Scottish then we needed to ever learn.

[...] A UUID, or Universally Unique Identifier, will generate a 128 bite unique key in different series based on the version you asked for. RFC-4122 dictates how Uuids should be generated, and recommends 4 types.

Matt then goes on to describe each of the different UUID types and provides some code examples as illustration:

• Version 1: Time and MAC addressed based Uuid
• Version 2: DCE-based
• Version 3: UUIDs based on a namespace and then it is MD5 hashed
• Version 4: Random generation (based on the output of random_bytes

He also includes examples of the UUIDs output by each method (not much difference there as the structure of the resulting UUID is all the same).

In a new post to his site Ben Ramsey finally gets around to posting about a library of his that's not only already widely used but has already been around for a few years - his ramsey/uuid library for generating UUIDs.

It seems quite absurd for me to introduce ramsey/uuid, a library that saw its 1.0.0 release on July 19, 2012, and is now at version 3.4.1, having had 35 releases since its first, but what’s even more ludicrous is that I haven’t once blogged about this library. I mention it only in passing in my “Dates Are Hard” post. So, allow me to introduce you to perhaps a familiar face, an old friend, the ramsey/uuid library for PHP.

He starts with some of the original beginnings of the language back when Composer usage was just first taking off. He'd found other UUID implementations in PHP but none that rivaled the features found in library for other languages. He then briefly explains what a UUID is and what the RFC defines them as. He talks about the name change on the package (from the "Rhumsaa" namespace to "Ramsey") and an issue he received where UUIDs were colliding...as well as how he corrected it. He wraps up the post looking at some of what's coming for the library and what kind of improvements he'll be making in v3.4.1 and beyond.