gursht

gursht - a simple URL shortener written in GO

Still a WIP

I always wanted to write something in Golang, and this is my first real mini project trying it out.

My main motivation behind this was getting a url shortener for my mutt configuration. z3bra uses a url shortener too, and I wanted to implement this too. The main idea behind it, is getting rid of mutt's + line wraps when a link gets too long for the term.

Find a demo of the app running on https://s.uff.li. Feel free to use it.

Getting started

build & run it manually

git clone https://github.com/eyenx/gursht && cd gursht
go build 
./gursth # you need to have a redis running on localhost

Docker

This mini URL Shortener app uses Redis to keep state. You can use it directly with the provided deploy/docker-compose.yml or with this oneliner:

docker run -n gursht_redis -d redis
docker run -p 3000:3000  -e REDIS_HOST=gursth_redis ghcr.io/eyenx/gursht:latest

Access http://localhost:3000 and read the howto.

Kubernetes

tbd

Helm

tbd

Usage

a simple request looks like this:

curl -d '{"LongUrl":"https://example.com/my/very/long/url"}' localhost:3000 -H "Content-Type: application/json" 
{"LongUrl":"https://example.com/my/very/long/url","ShortUrl":"http://localhost/2eCRU"}% 

This will save the created short url into redis by mapping it with the long url as value.

Now, accessing your host with the newly created short url, will redirect you to the long one:

curl http://localhost:3000/2eCRU
<a href="https://example.com/my/very/long/url">Moved Permanently</a>.

Additional configuration

configuration is done by setting environment variables:

REDIS_PORT # set the redis port to use
REDIS_HOST # set the redis host to use
SHORTURL_HOST # set the external short url hostname 
SHORTURL_LENGTH # set the length of the created random short path (default: 5)

TODO

• Make it possible to provide the short url on request
• Already saved longurl shouldn't be mapped to a new shorturl (might not work with redis as backend)
• index.html should provide a Getting started
• GitHub Workflow to autobuild the image
• deploy/ folder providing docker-compose & kubernetes Yaml files
• Helm Chart?