chhoto-url/README.md

What is it?

A simple selfhosted URL shortener with no name because naming is hard

But why another URL shortener?

I've looked at a couple popular URL shorteners, however they either have unnecessary features, or they didn't have all the features I wanted.

Features

• Shortens URLs of any length to a fixed length, randomly generated string
• (Optional) Allows you to specify the shortened URL instead of the generated one (Missing in a surprising number of alternatives)
• Opening the fixed length URL in your browser will instantly redirect you to the correct long URL (you'd think that's a standard feature, but apparently it's not)
• Provides a simple API for adding new short links
• Links are stored in a plaintext CSV file
• Available as a Docker container (there is no image on docker hub yet)
• Backend written in Java using Spark Java, frontend written in plain HTML and vanilla JS, using Pure CSS for styling

Screenshot

Planned features for 1.0 (in order of importance

• Some form of authentication
• Input validation (on client and server)
• Deleting links using API and frontend
• Better deduplication
• Code cleanup
• An actual name
• Official Docker Hub image

Usage

Clone this repository

git clone https://github.com/draganczukp/url

Building from source

Gradle 6.x.x and JDK 11 are required. Other versions are not tested

1. Build the .jar file

gradle build --no-daemon

The --no-daemon option means that gradle should exit as soon as the build is finished. Without it, gradle would still be running in the background in order to speed up future builds.

2. Set environment variables

export username=<api username>
export password=<api password>
export file.location=<file location> # opitonal

3. Run it

java -jar build/libs/url.jar

4. Navigate to http://localhost:4567 in your browser, add links as you wish.

Running with docker

docker run method

1. Build the image

docker build . -t url:1.0

2. Run the image

docker run -p 4567:4567 -d url:1.0 

2.a Make the CSV file available to host

touch ./urls.csv
docker run -p 4567:4567 \
	-e file.location=/urls.csv \
    -e username="username"
    -e password="password"
	-v ./urls.csv:/urls.csv \
	-d url:1.0

docker-compose

There is a sample docker-compose.yml file in this repository. You can use it as a base, modifying it as needed. Run it with

docker-compose up -d --build