Shorty: A URL Shortener

A simple URL shortener that will create a unique shortcode for a URL. Making a request for the shortcode will redirect a user to the desired target URL.

You can try it out for yourself:

curl -s -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"long_url":"https://github.com/reagent"}' \
  "http://shorty-ruby.herokuapp.com/short_link" | python -m json.tool

Installation

git clone git@github.com:reagent/shorty-ruby.git
cd shorty-ruby && bundle

You can run the server via rackup and it will listen on port 9292:

bundle exec rackup

Features

The following features have been implemented:

Requires a Content-Type of application/json when submitting a link to be shortened (will 404 on an unrecognized content type)
Uniqueness checks for URLs take into account the GET parameters that are supplied without regard for order, the same parameters with a different order will result in a single shortcode
There is a small chance that a generated shortcode will collide, but the application will attempt to re-try generation up to 3 times before returning an error to the user
Requesting a shortcode URL (regardless of Content-Type) header will redirect the user to the source URL
Accesses to the short URL are tracked and a report is available by requesting the shortcode URL with a + appended to it

Examples

Creating a short link:

curl -s \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"long_url":"http://google.com"}' \
  "http://localhost:9292/short_link" | python -m json.tool

{
    "long_url": "http://google.com",
    "short_link": "http://localhost:9292/ZtmLzB"
}

Creating a short link from a URL with the same GET parameters:

curl -s \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"long_url":"http://example.org?one=a&two=b"}' \
  "http://localhost:9292/short_link" | python -m json.tool

{
    "long_url": "http://example.org?one=a&two=b",
    "short_link": "http://localhost:9292/w51n6o"
}

curl -s \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"long_url":"http://example.org?two=b&one=a"}' \
  "http://localhost:9292/short_link" | python -m json.tool

{
    "long_url": "http://example.org?one=a&two=b",
    "short_link": "http://localhost:9292/w51n6o"
}

Requesting a shortcode:

curl -i "http://localhost:9292/w51n6o"
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8
Location: http://example.org?one=a&two=b
Content-Length: 22
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
Connection: keep-alive
Server: thin

301 Moved Permanently

Fetching an access report for a shortcode:

curl -s \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  "http://localhost:9292/byDkfX+" | python -m json.tool

{
    "response": [
        {
            "referrer": "http://localhost:9292/",
            "time": "2019-09-20T21:06:24.375Z",
            "user_agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.13; rv:69.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/69.0"
        },
        {
            "referrer": "none",
            "time": "2019-09-20T21:03:19.013Z",
            "user_agent": "curl/7.54.0"
        },
        {
            "referrer": "none",
            "time": "2019-09-20T21:03:17.726Z",
            "user_agent": "curl/7.54.0"
        }
    ]
}

Running Tests

Tests are located in app_spec.rb for all unit and integration tests. Run with:

bundle exec rspec