Simple PHP Redirect

This is a really simple project. And as it's only my second foray into PHP, I doubt it's very well coded.

The application is just a URI redirect, so for example if I wanted to link to the Cyotek Blog (which is currently at https://www.cyotek.com/blog) from an application I could create an entry named "blog" pointing to that URL and then my application would call https://go.cyotek.com?id=blog. If this was later changed to https://blog.cyotek.com/ (which it was!), I can update the entry in the database and existing code will find the new location.

Of course, if I did do that, I'd still have put some sort of redirect in place which makes this project a bit moot for URL's that you have full control over. However if you make use of external services such as PayPal then this project could be more useful. Another slight benefit is that URL's should be slightly shorter, although this isn't really the goal of this project.

Requirements

• PHP with PDO and SQLite support
• Raw access to the database as there's no management interface to change settings or add new URI's.
• Composer is required for downloading vendor packages

Setup

Create a SQLite database named redirects.db and apply redirects.db.sql to this database.

Populate the Url table with URL's.

There are two configuration settings in the Config table, Title and HomePage. Use these to configure the information displayed when viewing index.php without providing a redirect ID, which is slightly more friendly than display an "not set" error.

Calling the redirect

Call index.php with a id query string parameter that contains either the numeric ID or slug of the URL to redirect.

Parameter injection

If your URL entry includes {name} sequences, then the redirect will try and replace these with query string parameters.

For example, if you had a URL entry named docs set with the URL pattern https://docs.cyotek.com/cyowcopy/{version}/, you could call it as ?id=docs&version=1.2, resulting in a final URL of https://docs.cyotek.com/cyowcopy/1.2/. Missing parameters will be substituted with blank values.

GDPR and Privacy

If the AnonymizeAddresses configuration property is set to true, IP addresses will be automatically anonymised.

Using the management pages

There are several basic overview pages, activity.php, error.php and list.php. These are "protected" via the use of an API key, which can be supplied by either the ApiKey header or apikey query string parameter.

To configure the API key, change the value of the ApiKey entry in the Config table. Note that if the key is left blank, the management pages will not load.

There are no configuration pages for adding, removing or updating URL entries - you'd need to dig into the database to do that. I do plan on adding them at some point, but at the same time I don't want to worry about injection attacks or weak security given my beginners knowledge of PHP.

Two additional pages exist, also protected via the API key. The first, config.php simply lists the contents of the Config table. The second, migrate.php does a basic check of all IP addresses in the database, and anonymises them (if the AnonymizeAddresses parameter is set)