shorter

This is some kind of URL-shorter.

Give it something that looks like an URL, and it will give you some short link.

Opening that short link will redirect you there.

Redirection

• Short links are protected by the robots.txt.
• A nofollow attribute is added to the link on the redirection page.
• The redirection page adds some X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow header.
• Known crawlers will receive a 403 (Forbidden) error page instead of the redirection page.
• Redirects are done via JavaScript and/or HTML meta tags to remove the referrer.

Deployment

Currently it runs on some FreeBSD server. I won't get too specific here, but keep this in mind:

• Configuration is done via environment variables. Have a look into the shorter/start/environment.py file (everything using getenv is configurable).

• Use gmake for the makefile

• Do not forget to run gmake assets if using the default theme

I am using mariadb as database, the setup is somewhat specific..

• Create Database:
  • Use utf8mb4 because obvious reasons.
  • Use utf8mb4_bin as collation, because the symbols used are case sensitive.

    CREATE DATABASE shorter CHARACTER SET = 'utf8mb4' COLLATE = 'utf8mb4_bin';

• Create user and set permissions:
  • Choose a better password than this.

    GRANT ALL ON shorter.* TO 'shorter'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

• Check your settings:

    USE shorter;
    SELECT @@character_set_database, @@collation_database;

It should output utf8mb4 and utf8mb4_bin.

• Install the PyMySQL package into the virtual environment:
  • You should have openssl for that.

    venv/bin/pip3 install -r requirements-mysql.txt

• Now create the short table:

    env \
        DEBUG=0 \
        FLASK_ENV='production' \
        DATABASE='mysql+pymysql://shorter:password@localhost/shorter?charset=utf8mb4' \
            gmake dbup

Use the same DATABASE string to run the application.

Manually fixing

In case anything got wrong, use these commands to manually fix them.

  ALTER DATABASE shorter CHARACTER SET = utf8mb4 COLLATE = utf8mb4_bin;

  ALTER TABLE short CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_bin;

Make sure to have a backup, before attempting this!