Canister name limit of 24 characters is too restrictive

Developers
1

@yhabib

On the NNS dapp Canisters management page,
a canister name is limited to a maximum of 24 characters.

This is often too short in practice.
It’s also well below the 64-character limit allowed for contact names.

Raising it to 32 would already be a significant improvement.
Not sure what the implications of such a change would be on your side.

Best regards.

2

Hi @jdelforge

I wonder, do you have so many canisters that those eight characters make a difference? I’ll take a look at the implications of increasing it and let you know.

3

@yhabib

I have about 50 canisters running…

In order to match the architecture of my projects, which are split across already-large repos containing about close to 10 canisters each, I ideally have to name the canisters as such:

Project Repo Canister Env Subnet

Example with short names, already a total of 26 characters:
Waffle Admin Core Prod GLO

Example with realistic names, total, 31 characters:
Pancake Settle Execute Prod FID

So the limit of 24 is often a pain,
and I end up with names that are hard to decode at a glance.

Thanks!

4

I wonder if it might be better to instead be able to group canisters under a group name (so canisters that relate to different projects can be grouped together). What do you think @jdelforge?

5

@Lorimer

Sure, that could help to remove Project from the line.
But it sounds more like a workaround than the actual fix, and it’s probably more work for DFINITY than extending a max length.

And even with grouping, the limit would still bite.

CycleOps allows much longer canister names, so I end up having the full names in CycleOps, and a shorter version of them in the NNS. Not fantastic.

There may also be a layout angle here. I proposed a toggleable list view back in January (mockup in the thread), and the 24-char cap reads like a card-layout constraint that ended up in the data model.

That said, for a canister management page, a list view would be far more readable on desktop. And in small-width mobile view, 32 characters would still hold in one line with no ellipsis.

6

Hi @jdelforge

Thanks for your answer. I’ll look into it this week. I’ll keep you posted.

Cheers

7

Hi @jdelforge
This is part of this week’s proposal: https://forum.dfinity.org/t/proposal-143823-to-upgrade-the-nns-dapp-2026-09-05/75543