Short URL

A fully functional URL shortener using MySQL as the storage server and Redis as the cache server.

The current components include:

• a web server for URL shortening and redirection
  • regex to verify validity of a URL
  • Base62 encoding to compress a long URL
• an external Redis cache server
• a local dev enviroment setup with docker-compose
• automatic configuration management with a single .env file
• logging
• docs generated by swagger
• request timeout control
• in-memory cache
• [TODO] integration test running on CI
• [TODO] IP based rate limiting

Docs

Docs are generated by gin-swagger. To access the docs, open your browser and go to the following link after launching the web server on your localhost.

http://127.0.0.1:8000/swagger/index.html

Usages

We provide two API endpoints: one for URL shortening and another for URL redirection.

URL shortening

POST /api/v1/data/shorten

• Request parameter: {longURL: string}
• Rreturn: shortURL

Example usage:

$ curl -iX POST 'http://localhost:8080/api/v1/data/shorten?longURL=www.google.com'
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Date: Fri, 01 Dec 2023 05:10:33 GMT
Content-Length: 18

{"shortURL":"aA4"}

URL redirection

shortURL: The request URI path

GET /api/v1/:shortURL

• Request parameter: no, using URI path binding instead
• Return: longURL for HTTP redirection

Example usage:

$ curl -i 'http://localhost:8080/api/v1/aA4'
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Location: /api/v1/www.google.com
Date: Fri, 01 Dec 2023 05:11:54 GMT
Content-Length: 57

<a href="/api/v1/www.google.com">Moved Permanently</a>.

Command Runner

We use the command runner just as an alternative to makefile. Execute just help to access a complete list of available commands. If you do not have just installed, check the justfile for all receipts.

Build and Run Locally

We use docker-compose to set up local development pretty easily. It exposes a web server forwarded to host port 8080, a MySQL server forwarded to host port 3306, and a Redis server forwarded to host port 6379. To launch, simply run:

$ docker-compose up -d

Then you are ready to go.

To build a binary, run:

$ just build

To connect to the mysql server, run:

$ just mysql

To connect to the redis server, run:

$ just redis

License

MIT License