🔗 Shorty

A self-hosted URL shortening service built using Flask & Postgres.

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Getting Started

Clone or download this repository.

git clone https://github.com/PadamSethia/shorty.git

cd shorty/

python ./app.py

Prerequisites

This project requires Flask and Postgresql . And psycopg2 python module for connection. You can install it using the following commands .

pip install flask

For Postgres as backend

sudo apt update

sudo apt install postgresql postgresql-contrib

pip install psycopg2-binary

Now run the following command to create the Postgres table

python ./create_table.py

Configure the Postgres database credentials in config.py Set the host , user , password and database name for Postgres connection.

RESTful API

POST /api/v1/shorten with form data url=https://github.com/PadamSethia , custom=blah & tag=test custom and tag are optional.

{
    "custom": "blah",
    "long_url": "https://github.com/PadamSethia",
    "short_url": "http://localhost:5454/blah",
    "tag": "test" 
}

GET /api/v1/expand/ with form data custom=blah

{
    "click_browser": {
        "CHROME": 0,
        "FIREFOX": 0,
        "OTHER_BROWSER": 0,
        "SAFARI": 0
    },
    "click_platform": {
        "ANDROID": 0,
        "IOS": 0,
        "LINUX": 0,
        "MAC": 0,
        "OTHER_PLATFORM": 0,
        "WINDOWS": 0
    },
    "clicks": 0,
    "custom": "blah",
    "long_url": "http://github.com/PadamSethia",
    "tag" : "test"
}

for now the web app and api run on different ports. app : 5000 , api : 8000

Running for production

This section outlines how to setup and run shorty on web servers. In this case I'll consider AWS EC2 instance.

• Set up the EC2 instance.

...Learn more

• Clone this git repository.

Change the Host in app.run() to 0.0.0.0 , for both shorty_api.py and app.py

Now if you run python ./app.py , shorty should run under the server IP as <server host>:<port> By default the port is 5000 , make sure to open the port before running the app.

Creating Script for running the app

The inbuilt flask server is not built for production , it might do down after a couple of days . So we need to use production ready web servers , for this we'll use uWSGI and Nginx.

First install uwsgi and nginx on EC2 instance

pip install uwsgi

If it doesn't work install from distro repo

For Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install uwsgi-core uwsgi-plugin-python & nginx

For CentOS / Amazon Linux

sudo yum install uwsgi & nginx

Using uWSGI to run app.py and shorty_api.py

The uwsgi file is already setup in this repo , just change the to your user name . For eg ,

wsgi-file = /home/<user>/shorty/app.py

Just change the <user> to your sepecified user name , for me it would be

wsgi-file = /home/padam/shorty/app.py

So update the uwsgi_app and uwsgi_api files.

Now to run the script , run

uwsgi --ini uwsgi_app &

The & is used to run app.py in background.

For the API run

uwsgi --ini uwsgi_api &

Both the processes will run in background .

Projects Used

• Skeleton CSS Framework
• Clipboard.js

License

This project is licensed under the MIT Licene.