Midget Gems

An URL shortener service for your precious links.

User stories

The application supports the following user stories.

• As a user, I want to submit an URL and receive a short URL in return
• As a user, when I navigate to the short URL I want to be redirected to the original URL
• As a user, navigating to the short URL should increase the visit count by 1
• As a user, I want to submit a short URL and see how many times it has been visited
• As a user, when I navigate to a non-existing short URL I should see a page informing the URL doesn't exist

Addtional requirements

• Short URLs should not be easy to guess
• Submitting the same URL more than once should return its corresponding short URL instead of creating a new short URL
• Check if a URL is already a short URL to avoid shortening a short URL
• Check if the URL leads to a valid page before shortening it
• Make it harder to shorten URLs that lead to known malicious sites (short URLs are often used by scammers)

Built with

Backend application

The backend application is built with Node.js. The application use:

• TypeScript for type safety and better tooling.
• Express.js for setting up a basic server.
• Postgres.js to connect with a Postgres database. Postgres.js was selected before the more common node-postgres beacause of its simple surface API and dynamic query support.
• NanoID for generating short URL's.

The backend application lives inside the ./backend folder.

To start the backend application locally, run npm run backend from the project root directory ./.

By default, the backend application will run on port 8080.

Persistent storage

The application use a Postgres database for persistent storage and Postgres.js to connect db with the backend.

Front-end application

The frontend is built by Maxim Orlov. It is not part of the version control.

The front-end application lives inside the ./frontend folder.

To start the front-end application locally, run npm run frontend from the project root directory ./ and go to http://localhost:3000 in your browser.

By default, the front-end applicaton will run on port 3000. If you wish to use a different port, change the PORT= value inside ./package.json.

The app will try to reach the back end at http://localhost:8000. You can configure this by changing the API_URL variable inside the ./frontend/.env file.

Credits

Credits to Maxim Orlov for for providing the frontend and project setup. Awesome stuff, highly recommend.

License

Licensed under the MIT license.