mkshrt.xyz

A fully featured FOSS, ad & tracker free URL shortener.

Features:

• Can be self-hosted
• Configured with YAML
• Shortens URLs to at most 28 characters. (with the default domain)
• No ads, tracking or other nonsense

Dependencies:

• MariaDB or MySQL

Why?

1. It's fun to implement
2. Almost every other service just wants to steal your data

Live Demo

mkshrt.xyz

Building from source

Make sure you have the latest version of go available and in your $PATH.

Clone this repository.

git clone https://github.com/dusnm/mkshrt.xyz.git && cd mkshrt.xyz

if the target OS and/or architecture differs from the one you're compiling from, set the GOARCH and GOOS environment variables accordingly. For example, to build for linux and amd64 you'd set them like this.

export GOOS="linux"
export GOARCH="amd64"

You can list all the available GOOS/GOARCH combinations by running the following command.

go tool dist list

Build the binary while bundling all dependencies.

export GOOS="linux" && \
export GOARCH="amd64" && \
export CGO_ENABLED=0 && \
go build -o mkshrt .

Make the resulting binary executable.

chmod +x ./mkshrt

You can now move the resulting binary to the /usr/local/bin/ directory.

mv ./mkshrt /usr/local/bin/mkshrt

Configuration

The application is written to look for a configuration file in the following directories.

1. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/mkshrt/config.yml
2. /etc/mkshrt/config.yml

You can change the configuration file location easily, by setting the $XDG_CONFIG_HOME environment variable.

Example configuration is provided in res/config.example.yml

Logging

You must create the log directory in whatever location you specified when you modified the configuration file. The process running the application must have write access to that directory.

For example, if you set the log path as /var/log/mkshrt/mkshrt.log, and you're using the www-data user to run the process, You'd set the permissions like this.

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/log/mkshrt

Preparing the database

The application uses MySQL or MariaDB (recommended) as its database.

The database schema is provided in res/schema.sql. To import it, run the mysql utility.

mysql -u username -p database_name < ./res/schema.sql

Running the application with systemd

A systemd unit file is provided in res/mkshrt.service. Place this file in the `/etc/systemd/system/' directory and reload the systemd daemon to make it aware of the new service.

cp ./res/mkshrt.service /etc/systemd/system/mkshrt.service && systemctl daemon-reload

You can then start and enable the service with this command.

systemctl enable --now mkshrt.service

Check the status of the service and look for errors, if any.

systemctl status mkshrt.service

If you configured everything correctly, the application should now be available at the socket you specified in the config file. The default location is http://localhost:6060.

From here you can configure a reverse proxy, like nginx, to handle stuff like domains and TLS certificates.