redirect-server

Small server that uses MongoDB for redirecting. Can be used as an self-hosted shortlink service for example.

Note!

In January 2021 project will be archived and no new changes will be made. Please also note that the server hasn't been tested in production, so be careful! You are free to borrow any code you might find useful. 😄

Read more at https://klooven.link/archive.

Usage

There's a small setup needed to get the server up and running...

.env

Create a .env file in the server root directory. Set these values (example below):

RS_NAME=Development
RS_PORT=2000
RS_DATABASE=mongodb://localhost/rs-development
RS_SECRET=supersecret

• RS_NAME is the name for the server, use anything you like
• RS_PORT is the port where the server runs on, there's no default value built in!
• RS_DATABASE is the MongoDB connection URL
• RS_SECRET is a secret for JSON Web Tokens (more later)

MongoDB

The redirects should be saved to MongoDB to the redirects collection. Every entry looks like this:

{
  "path": "example",
  "destination": "http://example.com",
  "type": 307
}

• path is the server path, so in this case the redirect would happen when visiting http://your-redirect-server.com/example
• destination is the URL where to redirect the user
• type is the HTTP status code, recommended codes are 301 (permanent) and 307 (temporary)

Server-side cache

redirect-server uses a cache that will reset when the server restarts. In the case that you want to clear the case for one path without restarting the server, you have to do this:

• Sign a JSON Web Token using the secret in RS_SECRET (security: make sure that the JWT expires in a short time)
• Send a DELETE request to http://your-redirect-server.com/rs/cache/<PATH>
  • Use this header: Authorization: Bearer <YOUR JSON WEB TOKEN>

So if we want to reset the cache for the example redirect that we created earlier we send a DELETE request to http://your-redirect-server.com/rs/cache/example with the header Authorization: Bearer jU5tANex4mplEt0ken.

When should the cache be emptied?

The primary reason is if you have updated an redirect in the database. redirect-server will not notice this if the redirect is in the internal cache.