tonyjly/shortcake

shortcake is a Python application for shortening URLs

shortcake

A Python application for shortening URLs

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Features

• Create unique short links (shortened URLs)
• 8-character length short link paths allow for greater than 218 trillion possible short links
• Maintains unique records for original links and short links (i.e. avoids duplication)
• View API example endpoints and basic testing at http://127.0.0.1:8000/docs

Dependencies

• Docker 19.03.0
• Docker Compose 3.8
• Python 3.9
• pip 22.0.3
• FastAPI 0.74.1
• PostgreSQL 14
• SQLAlchemy 1.4.31
• pydantic 1.9.0
• starlette 0.17.1
• Uvicorn 0.17.5

Getting Started

1. Clone repo
2. Navigate to project root directory
3. Run docker-compose up

Usage

To view a list of original links, visit:

http://127.0.0.1:8000

or

http://127.0.0.1:8000/links

To view a list of short links, visit:

http://127.0.0.1:8000/short-links

To shorten a link, input original link as value of long_link:

curl --location --request POST '127.0.0.1:8000/add-link' \
    --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
    --data-raw '{"long_link": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjcWToSAlZ8"}'

Visit a short link to get redirected by API to original link.

To view API endpoint documentation, please visit: http://127.0.0.1:8000/docs

Future plans and ideas

Features to add:

• Add column date_created for short links
• Count times_accessed for short links
• Augment frontend to allow users to interact with API more smoothly
• Add column email associated to creator of each short link
• Add unit tests
• Create a dashboard to manage short links and original links
• Implement reporting features (such as most accessed links, most popular domains, most frequent users etc.)

Maintenance

• Automating the testing of this service (possibly via an API testing framework, such as pytest with Tavern)
• Purge obsolete links from the database in case original links no longer point to valid pages
• Run automated server monitor and send alert when API or database servers go down
  • Monitor multiple endpoints
  • Run functional checks
    • CRUD operations
    • validate payloads using JSON schema validation
    • identify latency via API response times
  • Test for non HTTP 200 OK status codes for API requests that should fail
  • Test both prod and dev environments
    • Hopefully, identifying and fixing issues in dev will help avoid issues arising in prod

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change.

Please make sure to update tests as appropriate.

License

MIT License