elmergonzalezb/1y

A template project to build a short URL manager with Eleventy

1y: taking the 1t out of 11ty 😅

What is this?

1y is a short URL manager built with Eleventy (a.k.a. 11ty), the great JavaScript/Node based Static Site Generator.

This is not a URL "shortener", as it doesn't process anything. Short and long versions of URLs are managed manually, so that short URLs can be "beautiful".

How does it work?

1y generates redirection rules from your set of data, each URL being stored in a Markdown file:

• the fileSlug of the Markdown file (the filename without the extension in 11ty language) is the short URL. For example, the Markdown file nho.md you'll find in this template repository is used to create the https://<your-short-domain>/nho short URL.
• the long URL is stored in the file's Front Matter, for example here the nho.md file only contains these 3 lines:

  ---
  url: https://nicolas-hoizey.com/
  ---

So for this example, when you go to https://<your-short-domain>/nho, it redirects you to https://nicolas-hoizey.com/.

Redirection rules are generated in 4 formats to ease usage on different environments:

• Apache HTTP server with Alias module in a .htaccess file
• Apache HTTP server with Rewrite module (less efficient) in the same .htaccess file
• Netlify hosting with redirects in a _redirects file
• HTML pages with both HTML redirect (<meta> tag) and JavaScript Redirect. This is only meant as a last resort, only there if previous formats don't work. Your HTTP server needs to be able to respond to https://<your-short-domain>/nho with this actual ressource: https://<your-short-domain>/nho/index.html

You don't have to deal with any settings to chose which one to use, all 4 formats are generated at once.

What do I have to do to use it?

This repository is intended to be used as a template for creating your own repository.

The easiest: use Netlify Deploy Button

Clicking the button above will:

• create a new repository in your own GitHub account with 1y code
• and deploy a copy of this new repository to your Netlify account (you can create an account during this process if you don't have one).

Each time you push changes to your Github repository (or add files directly with Github's Web interface), Netlify will build the new redirection files.

If you want to use another hosting service: use the Github template

1. Click the Use this template green button in Github interface to create your own 1y repository in your Github account
2. Clone or download the new repository to your local computer
3. (optional) If you don't have npm yet, install npm
4. Install y1 dependencies with npm install
5. Add new short URLs as Markdown files in the urls/ folder
6. Generate the redirection files with this command: npm run build

Generated files to deploy are in the _site folder.

Contribution

You are welcome and encouraged to make changes to this website by submitting pull requests!

License

MIT

Copyright (c) 2020-present, Nicolas Hoizey