Make graphite's /render/?.... urls copy-pastable

[seveas]

Links to graphite images are completely unpastable to jabber/irc/mail as
clients mangle the humongous urls. These commits add a url shortener that can
shorten any graphite url from /what/ever/.... to /S/<base62_string>.

It can be used manually by prepending /s to the url path, and I added a button
to the graphite composer that does this for you.

[seveas]

Here's a screenshot of it in action:

[SEJeff]

Haven't had a chance to test this yet, but I love the idea

[chjohnst]

Will give this a try tmo awesome stuff!

On Sunday, February 24, 2013, Dennis Kaarsemaker wrote:

Links to graphite images are completely unpastable to jabber/irc/mail as
clients mangle the humongous urls. These commits add a url shortener that
can
shorten any graphite url from /what/ever/.... to /S/.

It can be used manually by prepending /s to the url path, and I added a
button

to the graphite composer that does this for you.

You can merge this Pull Request by running

git pull https://github.com/seveas/graphite-web url_shortener

Or view, comment on, or merge it at:

#158
Commit Summary

• Add url shortening views
• Integrate the short url functionality with the composer

File Changes

• A webapp/content/img/browser.pnghttps://github.com/Make graphite's /render/?.... urls copy-pastable #158/files#diff-0(0)
• M webapp/content/js/composer_widgets.jshttps://github.com/Make graphite's /render/?.... urls copy-pastable #158/files#diff-1(15)
• M webapp/graphite/app_settings.pyhttps://github.com/Make graphite's /render/?.... urls copy-pastable #158/files#diff-2(1)
• A webapp/graphite/url_shortener/init.pyhttps://github.com/Make graphite's /render/?.... urls copy-pastable #158/files#diff-3(0)
• A webapp/graphite/url_shortener/baseconv.pyhttps://github.com/Make graphite's /render/?.... urls copy-pastable #158/files#diff-4(58)
• A webapp/graphite/url_shortener/models.pyhttps://github.com/Make graphite's /render/?.... urls copy-pastable #158/files#diff-5(5)
• A webapp/graphite/url_shortener/views.pyhttps://github.com/Make graphite's /render/?.... urls copy-pastable #158/files#diff-6(24)
• M webapp/graphite/urls.pyhttps://github.com/Make graphite's /render/?.... urls copy-pastable #158/files#diff-7(2)

Patch Links:

• https://github.com/graphite-project/graphite-web/pull/158.patch
• https://github.com/graphite-project/graphite-web/pull/158.diff

[seveas]

Thanks for considering. It's already proving pretty useful here, so I'm going to add links to create short urls to graphplot pages etc. as well.

[rolandow]

How do I get this button to fetch the URL in my Graphite? I only have the first three buttons shown in the screenshot, missing the last two.

[obfuscurity]

I'm not 👎 on this, but it seems like odd bedfellows (to me) to add a URL shortener into Graphite proper. I understand your hesitancy to leak URLs outside of your organization, but there's probably a better solution imho.

[seveas]

It's certainly possible to use an external url shortener app, but it's the integration with the graphite UI that made it 1000% more useful for us than an external app. So my definition of 'better' is more integration :)

[obfuscurity]

I get the usability aspect of it, but it's a slippery slope if we start integrating bits that are tangentially helpful. By that logic we could add "send to" buttons for email, Campfire, Facebook, etc. Just because we can doesn't mean we should.

Again, I'm not 👎 on this, just trying to offer a voice of reason.

[SEJeff]

It does suck quite a bit to send graphite urls in emails or IM especially to users with brain dead email clients that get confused by urls with () in them. It also sucks in markdown. External URL shorteners no way, but a simple and integrated one would be much appreciated by some users.

When sending links to less technical users, this is very valuable.

[jmason]

sniping from the bikesheds: fwiw, I've seen a similar feature in Amazon's internal graphite-like system to deal with unpasteably humungous URLs.

[devopsrick]

++interest in this feature! Any chance it will be merged?

[obfuscurity]

@SEJeff Have you gotten a chance to test this? It seems the community has spoken. 😏

[lukevenediger]

I've seen what @jmason is talking about: their graphing front-end auto-shortifies the link and displays it on the page. As an interim step, it would be awesome if the "Direct URL" button on the Dashboard gave me a complete link, as opposed to everything except the scheme and host. Extra points for auto-highlighting the whole line as it appears.

[SEJeff]

@obfuscurity I've not yet, but am going to shortly when I get home (travelling right now) at the end of the week. I'm in Boston at the moment

[seveas]

I just rebased the patches onto current master and pushed the result.

[seveas]

Just a datapoint as to how useful it is for us: in the 4 months since we added this, 666 short urls were created.

[obfuscurity]

Clearly this is the devil's work at hand. Smite thine feature! 🔥

[jmason]

\m/

[syepes]

+1 This would be a great addition

[alistairking]

I'd also love to see this added. Was just about to code it myself when i saw this.

[alistairking]

I've been using this PR for a couple of months now and it has been really great - with one exception:
It seems that the default length for the URLField field type used in the model is 200 characters (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/fields/#urlfield), a limit that I easily ran over with Graphite render URLs.

In fairness I only came across this problem after switching to a MySQL backend, so perhaps SQLite does not enforce this constraint?

To get around the problem I changed the url field type in url_shortener/models.py to "TextField" and then followed the alter table workaround described at http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/2495 to trick MySQL and Django into playing nicely together when using a TextArea as part of a unique key.

I'm pretty new to django so I'm hoping there a better way to fix this.

[seveas]

Hmm, it's entirely possible that I did a manual alter table after syncdb, table definition here is:

url_shortener_link | CREATE TABLE `url_shortener_link` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `url` text NOT NULL,
  `date_submitted` datetime NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=1123 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 

[cbowman0]

I cherry picked this into my branch and it appears to be usable after these two commits:
cbowman0@bb776c6
cbowman0@a5efba4

I will be testing more.

[obfuscurity]

Sorry that this has languished for so long. If someone has the time and inclination to rebase this, I'd be happy to merge it.

[seveas]

I've pushed reworked commits based on todays master that include @cbowman0's changes.

[obfuscurity]

Unless anyone has objections, I'd like to merge this in today or tomorrow. /cc @esc @brutasse @SEJeff

[SEJeff]

Please do, I for sure would use this functionality. I'd probably implement it differently, but this is entirely reasonable

[deniszh]

Using that patch (backported to 0.9.12) in production, haven't any troubles, even on sqlite

[jmason]

awesome. thanks guys, looking forward to this ;)

[obfuscurity]

Note that this is only in the master branch. I don't expect that we'd want to any significant features in the 0.9.x branch anytime soon; 0.9.13 is expected to be our last release from that branch. We'll focus on getting a 0.10 release from master after that.

[brutasse]

It'd be nice to mention this change in the 0.10 release notes.