URL Shortener Microservice

Author

Created by Rafase282

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URL Shortener Microservice

• User Stories:
• Links
• Environment Variables
• Notes

Objective:

Build a full stack JavaScript app that successfully reverse-engineers this: https://shurli.herokuapp.com/ and deploy it to Heroku.

Note that for each Basejump, you should create a new GitHub repository and a new Heroku project. If you can't remember how to do this, revisit https://www.freecodecamp.org/challenges/get-set-for-our-api-development-projects.

As you build your app, you should frequently commit changes to your codebase. You can do this by running git commit -am "your commit message". Note that you should replace "your commit message" with a brief summary of the changes you made to your code.

You can push these new commits to GitHub by running git push origin master, and to Heroku by running grunt --force && grunt buildcontrol:heroku.

User Stories:

• I can pass a URL as a parameter and I will receive a shortened URL in the JSON response.
• If I pass an invalid URL that doesn't follow the valid http://www.example.com format, the JSON response will contain an error instead.
• When I visit that shortened URL, it will redirect me to my original link.

Links

• App Repo
• App Link
• DotEnv
• Redirect
• URL Validator URL
• callback Hell
• db.collection.findOne()

Environment Variables

While heroku can use them as is, cloud9 needs extra work to get them from the .env file that you would create.

Notes

There were quite a few things that I learned from this, first, everyone prefers to use Mongoose over plain MongoDB. Second, I need to create a collection or scheme if I use Mongoose.

This will do with plain MongoDB.

db.createCollection("sites", {
  capped: true,
  size: 5242880,
  max: 5000
});

Since I used MongoLab and I did not want to provide the url with username and password embedded to the whole wide word, something that everyone will want to avoid in production, I opted for using custom environment variables like process.env.MONGOLAB_URI For this to actually work on c9, not necessarily heroku I had to use

 require('dotenv').config({
   silent: true
 });

Otherwise it would not work. I have provided a link to learn more about it.

As for html and modifications on the fly, it is better to use jade so that is something I will be learning too. npm install jade -S will get you started.

You will then use render instead of sending a html file on the custom router like this:

res.render('index', {
  err: "Error: You need to add a proper url"
});

which will be handled by:

if (err)
    div
        h2(style = "color: red;")= err

on the jade file.

As for node and mongo, they work async which is something that skipped my mind while trying to return the results from a findone search.

Speaking of which, doing a find didn't yield the results I wanted so I opted for findone instead. Knowing this will save you much time and trouble.

Also you will have to pass the db as a parameter or you will have to connect and close each time.

• From the server files: api(app, db);
• From the API: module.exports = function(app, db) {
• From local functions: function save(obj, db) {

There are different ways to handle the url with the api:

• app.route('/:url') to get the short url to redirect.
• app.get('/new/:url*', handlePost); to handle a request to encode the url after new even though new is not a real directory.
• app.route('/') to display the main html file on root.
• app.route('/new') for handling errors to the user about bad usage, it should be used with an url to be encoded.