tristanhcole/urlshortener

A fast, simple and scalable Python + Flask URL Shortener 🐍🔗

URLShortener

A fast, simple and scalable Python + Flask URL Shortener

Setup

• Install python requirements pip install -r requirements.txt

• Create database urlshortener

• Run migrations and start python manage.py db upgrade && python app.py

• Install frontend and run npm i && npm run dev

How it works

[POST] Creating a new shortlink

http://127.0.0.1:5000/api/v1/shortlink

Body: { "dest": "http://example.com"}

Optional: Provide a custom slug

[GET] Redirection

http://127.0.0.1:5000/$SLUG

Returns a 302 redirection.

Design

The URL Shortener uses the next shortlink_id_seq to convert into a random, unique, URL friendly slug via a base encoder. This ensures that the links are fast to create, unique, short and we can store a large amount.

Currently a 62 alphabet is used, meaning with a 7 character slug there are ~5 trillion unique combinations.

Built with Flask, Python and React