earl is a tiny app for shortening URLs. It's built for fun and to keep my Go skills fresh. It exposes a couple of REST endpoints that handle the functionality. The shortened links are stored in Redis.
It also serves a very small web page on the root url (as seen on earl.sh).
With the project being mostly for fun, the most important information is how to run it locally and play with it.
docker-compose up
By default the app should start on localhost:8000.
The server is rebuilding on change by using reflex, so feel free to break stuff and watch the the app panic.
Aside from visiting earl.sh there are two other ways to play with it:
The easiest way to test it out is by using the REST API directly.
$ curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" --data '{"url": "https://earl.sh"}' https://earl.sh/api/shorten
A quick improvisation on how one can use it instantly on the command-line.
$ go install github.com/rallyos/earl@latest
$ earl shorten --url=https://earl.sh
If you install and build the executable from this repository, it points by default to https://earl.sh, but if you have deployed the app yourself, and want to shorten links from the command line - you have to point the executable by setting a EARL_HOST environment variable that points to your domain, or passing it as a --host flag when running the shorten command.
$ earl shorten --url=https://earl.sh --host=http://example.com
The app is lightweight and easy to deploy it yourself. It makes a couple of assumptions which can be changed and tailored to your needs.
The links are kept in Redis, so it's essential to set a REDIS_HOST envrionment variable that points to your storage.
By default the links are kept for 72 hours because I don't want to provide guarantees on earl.sh because it's a showcase site, not built for actual users.
This can be changed by setting up a EARL_LIFECYCLE environment variables and give it a number of hours for which the links should be accessible.
Another possibility for configuring this is by passing a --lifecycle flag to the executable, and giving it an amount of hours.