kellegous/go

Another Google-like Go short link service

A "go" short-link service

Background

The first time I encountered "go" links was at Google. Anyone on the corporate network could register a URL shortcut and it would redirect the user to the appropriate page. So for instance, if you wanted to find out more about BigTable, you simply directed your browser at http://go/bigtable and you would be redirected to something about the BigTable data storage system. I was later told that the first go service at Google was written by Benjamin Staffin to end the never-ending stream of requests for internal CNAME entries. He described it as AOL keywords for the corporate network. These days if you go to any reasonably sized company, you are likely to find a similar system. Etsy made one after seeing that Twitter had one ... it's a contagious and useful little tool. So contagious, in fact, that many former Googlers that I know have built or contributed to a similar system post-Google. I am no different, this is my "go" link service.

One slight difference between this go service and Google's is that this one is also capable of generating short links for you.

Installation

This tool is written in Go (ironically) and can be easily installed and started with the following commands.

GOPATH=`pwd` go install github.com/kellegous/go
bin/go

By default, the service will put all of its data in the directory data and will listen to requests on the port 8067. Both of these, however, are easily configured using the --data=/path/to/data and --addr=:80 command line flags.

DNS Setup

To get the most benefit from the service, you should setup a DNS entry on your local network, go.corp.mycompany.com. Make sure that corp.mycompany.com is in the search domains for each user on the network. This is usually easily accomplished by configuring your DHCP server. Now, simply typing "go" into your browser should take you to the service, where you can register shortcuts. Obviously, those shortcuts will also be available by typing "go/shortcut".

Using the Service

Once you have it all setup, using it is pretty straight-forward.

Create a new shortcut

Type go/edit/my-shortcut and enter the URL.

Visit a shortcut

Type go/my-shortcut and you'll be redirected to the URL.

Shorten a URL

Type go and enter the URL.

go's Issues

Deleting a link

Hi, how do you delete a link?

External database backend?

Would love to be able to set this up in an HA configuration, and the dependency on local storage makes this difficult. Would it be possible to add an option to use an external RDBMS such as Postgres or MySQL? Happy to contribute this myself, too, just new to Go and would need some pointing at where to make changes.

How to configure

You wrote in the README:
Make sure that corp.mycompany.com is in the search domains for each user on the network. This is usually easily accomplished by configuring your DHCP server.

How do I do that? I'm using Amazon Route53 and have it serving on the long domain (go.corp.example.com) but how do I allow users to just type go in their browser?

Installation Problems

I tried using the installation directions on a Raspberry Pi (running stretch) and it did not work:

$ GOPATH=`pwd` go install github.com/kellegous/go
can't load package: package github.com/kellegous/go: cannot find package "github.com/kellegous/go" in any of:
...

I then cloned the repo and tried using the Makefile. First run of make found several problems with sass:

• The current version does not recognize --no-cache as an option
• The --sourcemap=none option is now --no-source-map

Next closure-compiler does not seem to be the binary for any closure compiler I could find. I installed google-closure-compiler and updated the binary name to that.

Search query style expansion of links

Is there a way to have something like

http://go/find/xyz

go to

http://example.com/real-link/search?q=xyz

allow specification of resulting url domains.

To protect access I'm using google's IAP and having go.corp.foo.com redirect to golinks.corp.foo.com. Having the generated urls come out as http://go/short-url vs http://golinks.corp.foo.com/short-url would be nice.

Get a list of known short-links

Is there any way to retrieve a list of known short urls? If not, can I make a feature request? :)

Repository does not include license information

Integrating with our go links Chrome extension

We recently open-sourced our own go links implementation, Trotto. We're in the process of open-sourcing the Chrome extension that we built to make it easy to set up the go/somewhere magic, with or without DNS.

Right now, the extension works with the instance we manage at https://trot.to/_/auth/login, but there's no reason the extension couldn't work with other go links backends. Would you be interested in working with us to make the extension work with this go links implementation?