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URL Shortening: The core functionality of the microservice should be to generate short URLs from long ones. Both anonymous and authenticated users can create short URLs. Only authenticated users can update and delete their own short URLs.
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Redirect: Short URLs should redirect to the corresponding long URLs when clicked.
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Authentication: Authenticate users to restrict access to certain endpoints and features, such as Custom Alias, Expiration, Analytics and Blacklist.
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Authorization: Restrict access to certain endpoints based on user roles or permissions. For example, the users with admin role can delete any short URL but a normal user cannot delete other users URLs.
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Custom Alias: Authenticated (logged-in) users should be able to choose a custom alias for their short URLs.
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URL Expiration: Ability to set an expiration date for a short URL, after which it will no longer redirect. This feature is exclusive to authenticated users.
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Analytics: Tracking clicks and other related data, such as HTTP Referrer, Query Parameters, Geo Country etc. for each short URL, exclusive to authenticated users.
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Rate Limiting: Limiting the number of requests from a single IP address to prevent abuse. Implement both simple windowed per hour rate-limit as well as exponential back-off strategy. Increase the rate-limit for authenticated users.
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Blacklist: Ability to blacklist certain URLs or IP addresses to prevent spam and abuse. Implement both global (set by admin) blacklist and user-set blacklist.
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Logging: Log all requests and responses for debugging and analysis purposes.
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OpenAPI Spec: Generate an OpenAPI specification for the API to document the endpoints, parameters, and responses.
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JSON Validation: Validate all input and output using JSON Schema to ensure consistency and prevent errors.
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Security: Implement various security measures, including:
- SSL/TLS encryption to secure data in transit
- Hashing and salting passwords
- Preventing SQL injection attacks
- Preventing cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks
- CSRF protection
- Preventing brute-force attacks
- Content Security Policy (CSP)
- CORS restrictions
- Prevent Denial of Service (DoS) attacks & ReDOS attacks
- Protect against OWASP Top Ten vulnerabilities.
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Caching: Implement caching to improve performance and reduce server load, including:
- Caching frequently requested long URLs to avoid generating a new short URL every time for the same URL.
- Caching recently accessed short URLs to avoid looking up the corresponding long URL in the database every time.
- Using a cache eviction policy to remove stale or infrequently used cache entries.
- Using a distributed cache if the microservice is deployed on multiple servers or in a load-balanced environment.
- Using a cache control mechanism to invalidate or expire cache entries when the underlying data changes.
Adding caching to the microservice can significantly improve its performance and reduce the load on the database, but it's important to design the caching strategy carefully to avoid cache-related issues, such as stale data, memory exhaustion and cache stampede.
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Integration Testing: Writing automated tests to ensure that all components of the microservice are working together correctly, including:
- Testing the API endpoints and their responses
- Testing the database connectivity and data integrity
- Testing the caching functionality and its interaction with the database
- Testing the security measures, such as authentication and authorization
- Testing the logging and error handling mechanisms
- Testing the performance and scalability of the microservice under different load conditions
- Using a test runner and assertion library to automate the testing process
- Writing test cases for positive and negative scenarios to cover all possible use cases
- Using mock data and test fixtures to simulate different scenarios
arafathusayn/production-grade-url-shortener
A guide to create a URL shortener service in production
AGPL-3.0