url-shortener's Introduction

URL Shortener

This is a demo and proof of concept, it should not be leveraged for any meaningful work

This is a simple Flask application for shortening full urls to random strings, and then looking them up by that short string.

The front-end consits of Gunicorn WSGI server passing to a Flask python application.

The back-end consists of a Redis cache for quick lookup, and MongoDB for long term storage.

With this setup we can easily add more front-end servers, we could also easily loadbalance those services with something like haproxy or reverse nginx.

Requirements

Docker
docker-compose

Startup

Using docker-compose start up the 3 node stack (Gunicorn, Redis, Mongo)

$ docker-compose up

Usage

In order to get a short string for a full url in the application you need to POST to our endpoint:

$ curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"full_url": "http://nessy.info"}' http://localhost:8000/url/shorten
mtbl1j

Once the string is known we can go in reverse with a simple GET

$ curl http://localhost:8000/r/mtbl1j
http://nessy.info

If a short string is not stored a HTTP 404 will be returned:

$ curl -i http://localhost:8000/r/mtbl1
HTTP/1.1 404 NOT FOUND
Server: gunicorn
Date: Fri, 21 Jun 2024 21:06:48 GMT
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 20

Improvement

Below I will list some improvements and things to keep in mind

In a production environment we would setup both Redis and MongoDB in HA
We would take backups of the MongoDB persitent database
Redis should be fully a cache in this setup, lookups that don't hit cache and that are in MongoDB will be cached.
I would decorate our POST functions to check for some form of authentication/authorization (tokens)
Write unit test for each of the low level functions (this would be fairly easy as the logic isn't too complex)

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