SHORT URL LINK EXPANDER

A tool that gets the full url of a short url

Background

There are many tools like bitly, shorturl etc. through which we can convert our long and messy URL into a short and better looking URL.

But a URL expander will do the opposite. So we can get the original long URL from the short URL using it.

But why? Well some bad guy can take this virus download link eg. https://www.badsite.com/virus.exe and shorten it to https://shorturl.at/wDPZ5. And now just by seeing the short URL you won't be able to tell that this link downloads a virus. So sometimes to prevent viruses and inappropriate websites we can use a URL Expander.

Development Environment

Setup

Ensure you have the following softwares installed:

Node
Yarn
Docker (if you need to run as container)
Git

Clone the repository and proceed with the instructions below.

Running App locally

Project setup

yarn install

Compiles and hot-reloads for development

yarn run dev

Open browser and visit

http://localhost:5000

Running as Docker Container

From within the project directory run the following:

yarn docker:bash

to build image and container for app

when this is done, app will basically start on port 5000.

Viewing the running ports

Open a new terminal window and run the following command:

docker ps

You will be given a printout showing your running containers. Part of the printout should contain something like this:

.....   0.0.0.0:5000->5000/tcp,     short_url_link_expander

This tells you that the various machines exist "locally" at 0.0.0.0 and that the exposed web port have been mapped to port 5000.

Stopping Container

To stop the docker development environment, issue the following command from the project root:

yarn docker:down

This will stop all the container and related to this project.

Starting Container

To start the docker development environment another time run:

yarn docker:up

This will start the container again.

View the Home Page

To load the homepage of the app, visit the url below in a browser:

http://0.0.0.0:5000

Thus your adventure begins... The app is up and running.

sodiadrhain/short-url-link-expander