simple-redirect

An easy to use redirection script. What for? ehh... to have nice urls :D

Features

• supports multiple domains
• exposes an endpoint to reload the URLs
• if needed, it's able to execute a different script for each domain after the URLs are reloaded (useful if you need to invalidate a cache on a different server)
• it integrates nicely with github and cloudflare (because well... that's exactly my use case)

How it works

1. You define your URLs either using yaml or json files and make them accessible somewhere (see my redirections file for an example... hosted by github!).
2. You hit the /refresh endpoint for the script to load the URLs into redis
3. If you want, it executes a script you define after the domain URLs are refreshed

How I use it

• I have a free account with cloudflare, that's caching everything to get crazy speeds
• I store the redirections file in github
• I set up a webhook in the github repository so that when it receives a push it hits the /refresh endpoint
• • Github has a delay before it shows the updated file version, so I set up the webhook so that it sends &wait=10. What this does is just... well, waiting 10 seconds before grabbing the file from github :)
• • I also pass &domain=gmc.uy, so that when my repository gets updated, only my script is executed
• After the data is refreshed, I run a script that purges cloudflare's cache

How to set it up

Well, this could be the hardest part... it uses python, it has a couple dependencies, it uses redis... you could totally set it up (it's fairly standard) but the recommended way is to use the dockerized version that takes care of everything. You can see the Dockerfile to see what I'm doing, but it's fairly straightforward.

If you set it up using docker-compose, then this is my docker-compose.yml

version: '2'
services:
  simple-redirect:
    image: 'g3rv4/simple-redirect'
    restart: always
    environment:
      - REDIS_HOST=localhost
      - REDIS_DB=1
      - CONFIG_FILE=/var/config/config.json
    volumes:
      - '/path/to/config:/var/config'
    ports:
      - '8000:8000'

Once you have that running, it exposes the app in the port 8000. You may probably want to put an nginx between the app server and internet. You should mount /var/config containing a configuration file... here's mine for reference

{
    "key": "thisIsACrazySecretNobodyKnows",
    "domains": {
        "gmc.uy": {
            "urls": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/g3rv4/redirections/master/urls.json",
            "afterRefresh": "/var/config/clear-cache.sh -zone myZoneId"
        },
        "dv.uy": {
            "urls": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/d4tagirl/redirections/master/urls.yml",
            "afterRefresh": "/var/config/clear-cache.sh -zone anotherZoneId"
        }
    }
}

and if you're running scripts (as I am) they should also go in the config folder. Feel free to check out my blog post about it :)