Url Shortener

This app allows users to submit URLs to create shortened versions. The shortened URL redirects to the original URL when visited.

The site is deployed at https://ur-.herokuapp.com/ Rails version 4.1.4 Postgres DB

###Overcoming challenges

The first challenge was deciding how to come up with a short url scheme which I will discuss below.
How to redirect all specified traffic to a certain Controller#Action. In this case, I used get '*path', to: 'urls#redirect' in routes.rb to send all traffic with a path to the redirect action in my Urls controller.
Now the app is successfully redirecting all traffic, but I still had to find a way to grab the URL path to match it with the database. This was achieved calling the original_url method on request.

###The short URL scheme

I initially thought about simply creating an array [1..999999], shuffling it, and using the pop method to assign the last integer as the URL path. Ultimately I decided against this because it doesn't scale well (it can only handle 1 million URLs). I decided to go with a six character base64 path to solve the scale limitations. Unlike the first solution, a base64 generator has the possibility (however improbable) of not being unique. I solved this by building a method to check the db for all previously stored base64 strings.
To achieve the short url: create table with long_form url and short_form url, generate random base64 string, check uniqueness of string, store in db as short_form url path.

###Future Improvements

Check to make sure the submitted URL is valid.
Add JavaScript so that the visit count updates without having to reload the page.

joshuabamboo/url-shortener