README

Rationale

This is a very pre-MVP, Proof of Concept application.

Some assumptions and decisions have been made:

• The short URLs generated simply use Rails's SecureRandom.hex method to generate keys.

  • This was chosen as it is a nice simple way to get relatively easy to read URLs that don't use any difficult symbols. And hex uses a very limited character set that cannot accidentally generate profane URLs.
  • There are guardrails in place to ensure that in the unlikely case that non-unique keys are generated, the application will retry 10 times until a unique key is generated, and there is a unique index at the database level to ensure that the key is unique.
  • A key length of 10 was chosen to give a starting pool of approx 158 billion unique permutations, but it is easy enough in future to expand the key length to a higher value if needed in order to scale the system.

• The system is open and anonymous. A real system would ideally have a user authentication system, whereby users can only see and manage their own short URLs.

• While the Web application is the main way in the application of creating short-urls. The URL generation is abstracted out into a service object that is standalone from the Web application. It is feasible that in future the service could be called by other means such as via a CLI command or similar.

Future Ideas

• Add a user management system.
• Expiry dates for short URLs.
• Promotional/Customisable URL keys.

Getting Started

Ruby version: 2.7.6

System dependencies:

• SQLite

How to run the test suite:

rails test:all

Services (job queues, cache servers, search engines, etc.)

None

Deployment instructions

Nothing currently setup while development is in early stages.