Question. Why not just use Hashids? about laravel-model-hash

[adamhopkinson]

Good question!

I wasn't aware of hashids when I wrote laravel-model-hash. I do recall the logo, so must have seen it somewhere, but I did a search before writing mine and couldn't find anything that did what I was after. I've now read through the docs, but let me know if I've misunderstood any of it in my answer below.

laravel-model-hash looks to have a different purpose to hashids - primarily that is to replace the id in urls. I could have used hashids to generate those hashes - and this would have removed the need to persist the hash in the database - but I've previously been burned when merging systems with auto-incrementing ids. If the hash is stored in the database, some of this trauma would have been avoided, particularly having to redirect urls when the hash for a record needs to resolve to a new ID (yes I understand that ids should be permanent, but sometimes the world of work isn't ideal!).

In terms of what laravel-model-hash does in addition to what hashids can do:

• it's ready to go out-of-the-box
• it allows full customisation of the hash (alphabet, length, hash name)
• configuration can be taken from the default, from the provided config file or on a model-specific basis
• it automatically switches the RouteKeyName so that the provided hash is used in route model binding instead of the id

None of this is a criticism of hashids - they just have different purposes.

[adamhopkinson]

Reading the code for hashids, I can see that it is possible to change the length and alphabet of the generated hashes - so ignore that difference!