URL Shortener

Shorten URL's using your own domain

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes. See deployment for notes on how to deploy the project on a live system.

Prerequisites

Laravel 5.8+ (Not tested in previous versions)

Installing

1. Download it into your Laravel app using composer

composer require cedaesca/urlshortener

2. Publish the packages files

php artisan vendor:publish

3. Run the migrations.

php artisan migrate

Customizing the URL's code length

1. Go to the config file located on config/cedaesca/URLShortener.php

2. Change the length value for that of your preference.

URLShortener Facade

You have to add the URLShortener facade to your controller:

use cedaesca\URLShortener\Facades\URLShortener;

Then you'll have access to the create and redirect methods.

Shorten URL's

Use the create static method to shorten a given URL. This method receives the request as argument and returns an instance of the model if was successfully created or false if not:

URLShortener::create($request);

Redirecting users

First off, the redirection route expect a shortlink parameter, make sure to name it like that. Later, you can redirect the user to the expected target by returning Laravel's redirect response and giving the returning value of the target method as an argument. The target method also receives the \Illuminate\Http\Request instance.

Route::get('/r/{code}', 'UrlShortenerController@redirect')->name('rthis');

return redirect(URLShortener::target($request));

Logging redirected clients

You may want to track some statistics with your shortened URL's. At the moment you can track their user agent, their IP Address and the timestamps. You can decide what to do with that info.

To achieve this, call the log method before the target one in your redirect response. Give the ``\Illuminate\Http\Requestas the argument and now you can leave thetarget` argument blank.

return redirect(URLShortener::log($request)->target());

Default redirect

If the code given as argument is invalid, the redirect method will redirect the user to a default route. Change this from the config file.

1. Go to the config file located on config/cedaesca/URLShortener.php

2. Change the default_redirect value for that of your preference.