Sequel Generate Slug

Sequel Generate Slug: Multilingual URL Slug Generation for Your Sequel Models

Hello fellow Rubyists! 🚀

Today I’m excited to share my new open-source contribution to the Ruby ecosystem: the Sequel Generate Slug plugin. It solves a common yet critical task—automatically generating human-readable URL slugs for your Sequel models—with a focus on multilingual support and uniqueness.

Why Did I Create This Plugin?

As a Sequel enthusiast and Ruby lover, I’ve always found a lack of simple, flexible solutions for generating slugs that support Cyrillic, hieroglyphs, and other languages. Existing options either required awkward workarounds or were limited to Latin characters. I wanted to build a tool that:

• Works out of the box with any language 🌍
• Integrates into Sequel models with just one line of code
• Remains lightweight and transparent in its behavior

Key Features

class Post < Sequel::Model
  plugin :generate_slug, source: :title, destination: :slug
end

• Automation Without Magic Simply specify a source column (e.g., title), and the plugin generates a slug into the target field (:slug by default). When the title updates, the slug refreshes automatically.

• Multilingual by Design Use any language—the plugin handles Unicode seamlessly, converting characters into URL-friendly formats:

post.title = "Доброго вечора ми з України" # => slug: "dobrogho-viechora-mi-z-ukrayini"
post.title = "A quoi ressemble le texte en français avec ce plugin?" # => slug: "a-quoi-ressemble-le-texte-en-francais-avec-ce-plugin"

• Guaranteed Uniqueness If a slug conflicts, it’s appended with a numeric suffix (e.g., post-title-2). Uniqueness checks can even scope to additional columns (e.g., identifier) of the post.

post = Post.create(title: 'Hello World', identifier: 'abcdef')
post.slug # => 'hello-world'

post = Post.create(title: 'Hello World', identifier: 'abcdef')
post.slug # => 'hello-world-abcdef'

post = Post.create(title: 'Hello World', identifier: 'abcdef')
post.slug # => 'hello-world-abcdef-1'

Who Is This For?

• Multilingual projects (blogs, e-commerce, SaaS platforms)
• Sequel-based microservices (Roda, Sinatra, or standalone)
• Developers who value simplicity and clean code

The plugin is already powering several production projects and is available on GitHub under the MIT license. I welcome your pull requests, bug reports, and ideas!