url-shortener

To Run

In 2 shells:

npm run start:services

npm start:local

gcloud commands

gcloud app deploy

gcloud app browse

$(gcloud beta emulators datastore env-init)

gcloud beta emulators datastore start

gcloud auth

gcloud app logs read

Work Items:

async/await
Filter out special characters \u0ca0_\u0ca0 3XbpadZvtW8ysEZl7R/OkYHtRWZPHBoXibGSunutt6M=
Add more testing to drive better error handling
- some edge cases produce 500
Improve Mobile UI
Return uniform error objects and abstract error creation
Pull out validation logic as service and use it on front end as well
- include better messaging to user
Better 404 and 500 pages
Bootstrap Theme
Frontend testing (karma and mocha/chai or jasmine)
Security
- user input sanitization
  - trim leading and trailing symbols from all input
  - better handling of reserved short urls (like ‘api’)
Authentication
- Probably google oauth to allow viewing, changing, and deleting your created urls.
Analytics
- Google Analytics, Mixpanel, …?

Deploy:

Heroku

Backend:

Node.js with Express (considered loopback for more opinionated option)

Storage:

Store short url/long url as key/value. key/value pairs in redis.

In the future use redis persistence or postgres (with hstore for key/value pairs) to back redis.

Possibly just cache top hits and recently created URLs (rather than all urls)

Frontend:

Simple jquery/bootstrap frontend served by express. Allow users to pick their own short url or generate one for them. In the future, add user authentication and possibly use React.

Automatic short url generation:

Ambiguous chars removed from pool: 1, 0, capital or lower I, L, S, and O

CI/CD:

Codeship: run backend tests (and eventually frontend tests), then deploy automagically to heroku

SCM:

github

CDN/SSL/DDoS Protection:

Cloudflare for free SSL, CDN for the frontend (maybe shortened urls too?), and basic DDoS protection

Monitoring:

New Relic with Deployment Monitoring

Caching:

Using Google PageSpeed approach via grunt-filerev

User-Facing API:

GET / 

    takes you to the webapp

GET /:shortUrl

	looks up the given short url and sends back the long url as a redirect

API: at /api/v1/

PUT /url/:shortUrl  body: {longUrl: "string", shortUrl: “string”}

    create a new url resource

returns

    201 with the new key/value resource in json

    400 if the requested url fails validation

    403 if the key already exists and you don’t have permissions to change it (not implemented yet)

    500 if we fail to store it

GET /url/:shortUrl 

    retrieve url resource by shortUrl

    returns 

        200 if found

        404 if not found

POST /url body: {longUrl: "string"}

    returns new url resource with generated shortUrl and requested longUrl

Upcoming API:

DELETE /url/:shortUrl

    remove url resource by short url

jyonker/url-shortener

url-shortener

To Run

gcloud commands