#Shortener

A super simple, Sinatra based, Redis backed URL shortener designed to be deployed on Heroku.

Check it out here, but be aware that the css on the add page that displays the shortened link assumes you're using a short url, so it kind of looks like shit when it displays http://shortener1.heroku.com/whatev

for obvious reasons, the demo is configured with S3 disabled. However, if you are just looking to play around with short follow the instructions below and use http://shortener1.heroku.com as your the url you want to use.

v0.6.0 is pretty much a complete rewrite of most things short. The server has been divided up in to smaller chunks, seperating the shortening service from the view front-end, and adding an optional authentication layer, and then the short client was patched to use these changes. v0.6.0 will hopefully wind up being pretty close to version 1.0, but before then I want to put together some test cases and rewrite the docs to accuarately reflect the new server structure.

There shouldn't be any configuration changes most people need to make, unless you want to take advantage of the new features, if you'd like to check these out before I can improve the docs, once again the Configuration class will be your friend.

v0.5.0 updates how shortener stores some data. To assist in keeping your data, v0.5.0 also provides a rake short:data:dehyphenate_keys task that will update your existing data to the new schema. If have data from < 0.5 that you plan on using in a >= 0.5 world, you should run this task.

is now as easy as

gem install short

and

short

which will then prompt you to supply the config vars necessary to use the short executable or the short server. You can check out /lib/shortener/configuration.rb to see a list of available configuration variables.

configuration variables are parsed by default on-load and cached for each use, but all client methods allow override.

Shortener server provides a primitive API for interacting with shorts. You get the following.

get '/index.json'      => info on all shorts.

get '/delete/:id.json' => delete short @ id, returns {success: true, shortened: id}

get '/:id.json'        => data hash for short @ id

post '/add.json'       => data hash for new short
        can accept the following options:
          url:            the url to shorten
          expire:         time in seconds that this short should live
          max-clicks:     the maximum number of clicks this short should accept.
          desired-short:  a short that should be set for this url.
          allow-override: if desired-short is passed, whether or not to allow
                          a random short override.

post '/upload.json'    => data hash for new short,

a data hash will contain the following keys:

  shortened   => id of this short. i.e. 'xZ147'
  url         => url of this short. i.e. 'www.google.com'
  set-count   => number of times this url has been shortened.
  click-count => number of times this short has been resolved.

a data hash might contain the following keys:

  expire      => expire key that will be checked to see if this key will expire
  max-clicks  => maximum number of clicks this short will resolve for

  if it's an endpoint that performs an action it will have a success key set to true or false.
  (right now this is stupid and is set to true always, unless it errors, in which case you
  get a 500 server error. hopefully that changes with some better error messages.)


  S3 Keys

    S3          => true if this is S3 content
    extension   => the file extension of S3 content. i.e. 'm4v'
    file\_name  => the name of the file. i.e. '1234.m4v'
    name        => the descriptive name. i.e. 'Pandas'
    description => the description. i.e. 'A panda sneezes'

Shortener::Short provides methods to access the server. You can access it through the Shortener class or directly through the Shortener::Short class. You get:

• shorten
• index
• fetch
• delete

methods, each of which will return a/n istance of the Short class which will parse the data and provide some defaults and access to said data.

Use the short executable to

• start the shortener server
• shorten a url
• fetch info on a short
• delete a short
• view the index of shorts
• run a short rake task.

Short provides rake tasks for building and deploying an instance on heroku. Once you have short server running locally (i.e. you've figured out the conf stuff) you can run short rake heroku:setup and it will create a git repo of the necessary server files, create a heroku app, add the needed addons and push to the created heroku app. Run short rake -T to see more info.

Short makes use of a number of libraries, each of which has its own license.

Short uses the DWTFYWPL.

            DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
                    Version 2, December 2004

 Copyright (C) 20011 Jake Wilkins \

 Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified
 copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long
 as the name is changed.

            DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
   TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION

  0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.