UUID with CodeIgniter 4

Up until now, working with UUIDs and CodeIgniter 4 hasn’t been much fun, but that has now changed with the codeigniter4-uuid library.

Admittedly, working with UUID was not a big challenge when we were working with the Model class, but in order to do it “nicely”, we had to use Model Events. Everything would be fine until our application itself would not need to use Model Events. Then it would be a mess, because we would have to add UUID support to our existing Events code.

That is why a special library was created, which extends Model class and gives possibility to work with UUID. No matter if we want to store identifiers as text or bytes - everything is handled automatically.

Installation via composer:

composer require michalsn/codeigniter4-uuid

Then the only change we need to make is in the Model:

namespace App\Models;

use Michalsn\Uuid\UuidModel;

class MyModel extends UuidModel
{
    ...
}

This is enough to use UUIDs automatically for the primary key.