django-sqids is a simple and non-intrusive sqids library for Django. It acts as a model field, but it does not touch the database or change the model.

The project was forked from django-hashids to provide the same functionality with the newer Sqids library.

• Proxy the internal model pk field without storing the value in the database.
• Allows lookups and filtering by sqid string.
• Can be used as sort key.
• Allows specifying a min_length and alphabet globally.
• Supports custom min_length, prefix, and alphabet per field.
• Supports Django REST Framework Serializers.
• Supports exact ID searches in Django Admin when field is specified in search_fields.
• Supports filtering by __iexact, though matching is the same as __exact.
• Supports other lookups: in, isnull, gt, gte, lt, and lte.

pip install django-sqids

django-sqids is tested with Django 3.2, 4.2, 5.0 and Python 3.8 - 3.12.

Add SqidsField to any model

from django_sqids import SqidsField

class TestModel(Model):
    sqid = SqidsField(real_field_name="id")

TestModel.sqid field will proxy TestModel.id field but all queries will return and receive sqids strings. TestModel.id will work as before.

instance = TestModel.objects.create()
instance2 = TestModel.objects.create()
instance.id  # 1
instance2.id  # 2

# Allows access to the field
instance.sqid  # '1Z'
instance2.sqid  # '4x'

# Allows querying by the field
TestModel.objects.get(sqid="1Z")
TestModel.objects.filter(sqid="1Z")
TestModel.objects.filter(sqid__in=["1Z", "4x"])
TestModel.objects.filter(sqid__gt="1Z")  # same as id__gt=1, would return instance 2

# Allows usage in queryset.values
TestModel.objects.values_list("sqid", flat=True) # ["1Z", "4x"]
TestModel.objects.filter(sqid__in=TestModel.objects.values("sqid"))

You can use sqids to identify items in your URLs by treating them as slugs.

In urls.py:

urlpatterns = [
    path("item/<slug>/", YourDetailView.as_view(), name="item-detail"),
]

And in your view:

class YourDetailView(DetailView):
    model = Item
    slug_field = 'sqid'

Add the field to your ModelAdmin's search_fields to quickly find a record by its Sqid:

class MyModelAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    search_fields = [
        "sqid__exact",
    ]

The following attributes can be added in settings file to set default arguments of SqidsField:

1. DJANGO_SQIDS_MIN_LENGTH: default minimum length
2. DJANGO_SQIDS_ALPHABET: default alphabet

SqidsField does not reqiure any arguments but the following arguments can be supplied to modify its behavior.

The argument sqids_instance is mutually exclusive to min_length and alphabet. See sqids-python for more info about the arguments.

Some common Model arguments such as verbose_name are also supported.

When the Hashids project transitioned to Sqids, Sqids removed the "salt" parameter to prevent the appearance that it provides security or safety. In Sqids, the order of the alphabet affects the generated sqids. django_sqids provides a useful shuffle_alphabet function that helps reintroduce the same idea as the "salt" parameter by shuffling the alphabet. This can be used to generate a unique alphabet for each instance of SqidsField to prevent the same id from generating the same sqid across different instances of SqidsField.

The seed parameter is used to generate a unique ordering of alphabet for each instance of SqidsField. The alphabet parameter can be used to specify a custom alphabet.

from django_sqids import SqidsField, shuffle_alphabet

class MyModel(models.Model):
    # will use your configured default alphabet
    sqid = SqidsField(alphabet=shuffle_alphabet(seed='randomSeed'))

class HexModel(models.Model):
    sqid = SqidsField(alphabet=shuffle_alphabet(seed='randomSeed', alphabet='0123456789abcdef'))