URL Shortener
The project as it is hosts a webserver serving a web-based frontend at
localhost:8080, it's just a quick no-framework wrapper around the API, which
is at /api. The API itself exposes /api/shorten (PUT) and /api/:shortId
(GET) as outlined in the challenge, and both endpoints can accept/produce
plaintext (with Content-Type: text/plain;charset=utf-8) or JSON (with
Content-Type: application/json).
The webserver itself is built using WAI, Warp, and Servant, and (currently) talks to a Postgres database. The shortened URLs are based on the SHA256 hash, so shortening the same URL twice gives the same code instead of adding a duplicate.
How to run/build/test
The postgres server expects a database specified by the connection string in
pgConnStr, tests expect the same from pgTestConnStr. System-level
dependencies are handled by Stack and Nix, so assuming a system with Nix,
nix-shell --run 'stack {run/build/test} will take care of the rest!
What could be improved
- If it were a bigger project, the frontend should probably be redone using some
frontend framework, perhaps React with Typescript or
purescript-halogen. - The URL validation on the server is fairly coarse - it probably shouldn't
accept nonsense like
aaaaaaa:///////:///$$or even just:// - The
pgConnStrandpgTestConnStrfiles are a bit hacky; they should probably be moved to a "real" config file format, but that'd have to pull in parsers and such
Attribution
The icon is based off of the Twemoji chain-link emoji.