Rob's URL Shrtnr Service

This is basic URL shortener service built using Ruby and Sinatra.

Known shortcomings

Not persistant

There is no persistance. The in-memory URL map is emptied between server restarts.

Not scalable

The stateful nature of the app means it is not easily scalable since there would be no consistency between multiple processes running the application. Sequential requests could be distributed to different instances of the application and retrieve inconsistent results.

Not safe

Very little sanitization is done on the user input. This may leave the application vulnerable to exploitation or other users vulnerableto an attacker hiding a malevolent URL behind a benign looking shortened URL.

Guide

Assumptions

You have bundler installed

Steps

Clone this repository
Run bundle in the project root
Run rake test or rake to run all tests
Run rake run to start an instance of the application
Visit localhost:4567 in your browser to see the basic landing page
Or run curl localhost:4567 -X POST -d '{ "url": "http://www.farmdrop.com" }' to submit a URL from your terminal

Url Shortener Code Test

Without using an external database, we'd like you to create a URL shortening service. The URLs do not need to persist between restarts, but should be shareable between different clients while the server is running.

There should be an endpoint that responds to POST with a json body containing a URL, which responds with a JSON repsonse of the short url and the orignal URL, as in the following curl example:

curl localhost:4000 -XPOST -d '{ "url": "http://www.farmdrop.com" }'
{ "short_url": "/abc123", "url": "http://www.farmdrop.com" }

When you send a GET request to a previously returned URL, it should redirect to the POSTed URL, as shown in the following curl example:

curl -v localhost:4000/abc123
...
< HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
...
< Location: http://www.farmdrop.com
...
{ "url": "http://www.farmdrop.com" }

Use whatever languages and frameworks you are comfortable with. Don't worry about getting the whole thing working flawlessly, this is more to see how you structure a program. Please don't spend more than a few hours on it.

Bonus points:

I often forget to type "http://" at the start of a URL. It would be nice if this was handled by the application (frontend or backend is up to you).
We like to see how you approach the problem, so a few git commits with a clear message about what you're doing are better than one git commit with everything in it.
We like tests. We don't expect a full test suite, but some tests would be nice to see. Its up to you whether thats integration, unit or some other level of testing.
We'd be very happy to see a Dockerfile to run the project. This by no means a requirement, so don't go reading the Docker docs if you've never worked with it.
If you'd like to show off your frontend skills, you could create a simple frontend that can create and display shortened URLs without reloading the page.

Submission

Please clone this repository, write some code and update this README with a guide of how to run it.

Either send us a link to the repository on somewhere like github or bitbucket (bitbucket has free private repositories) or send us a git bundle.

git bundle create yournamehere-url-shortener-test.bundle master

And send us the resulting yournamehere-url-shortener-test.bundle file.

This .bundle file can be cloned using:

git bundle clone bundle-filename.bundle -b master directory-name

rpass/ruby-url-shortener