WHAT IS THIS?

This is the source for the simple tiny url service that is 
currently running at http://tiny.io.

tiny.io runs using Kurt, a simple libevent-based web
server. It can be easily scaled by deploying multiple 
Kurt-based daemons under a load-balancer such as pound
or nginx. Data is stored in MongoDB.


DEPENDENCIES

This tiny url service is built using the following components:
	Nu		The Nu scripting language
	NuMongoDB	Objective-C interface to MongoDB
	NuMarkup 	Nu operators for HTML generation	
	Kurt		A libevent-based webserver for use with Nu
	NuHTTPHelpers	HTTP helpers for use with Nu and Kurt

A MongoDB installation is also necessary.


URL CREATION

Currently tiny urls are created with a post to root of the tiny.io API.

Examples:

1. curl http://tiny.io/ -d url=http://www.neontology.com -d key=TINY_KEY

   This generates a random string to use as the tiny url.

2. curl http://tiny.io/ -d url=http://programming.nu -d tiny=nu -d key=TINY_KEY

   This attempts to use the specified string as the tiny url.

Tiny url creation will fail if a specified "tiny" value is in use, 
and if a url already has been mapped to a tiny value, that value will
be used instead of any specified or newly-generated value.


AUTHENTICATION

Currently the tiny server uses a trivial method of authentication. URL 
shortening requests must include a user key that is read from the 
TINY_KEY environment variable. Optionally, one ore more user keys
may be stored in the "secrets" collection in objects with the a
key named "key". To set this from the MongoDB shell, use the following:

> db.secrets.insert({key:"my-secret"})


MORE HELPFUL MongoDB COMMANDS

# select the tinyio database
> use tinyio

# remove hits added by benchmarking
> db.hits.find({user_agent:"ApacheBench/2.3"})


COMMAND LINE TOOLS

# to backup a collection
% mongoexport -d tinyio -c tinyurls > tinyio-tinyurls.json

# to restore a collection
% mongoimport -drop  -c tinyurls -d tinyio < tinyio-tinyurls.json


COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2010, Neon Design Technology, Inc.


LICENSE

Apache License, v2.0.