Short-URL

Convert long urls into short urls. With added backend complexity for a production-ready build.

Features

• Choose a custom path name for the short url, i.e. 127.0.0.1/mypathname

• Measure the amount of times a short url was used

How it works

• The original url and the short url with custom path is stored as a row in the database.
• When the short url is entered into the browser, the backend api will lookup the corresponding original url and perform a redirect.
• The backend api will also increment the click count for a short url whenever it is used.

This app uses 6 services:

1. Frontend - Javascript with React (create-react-app) for front-end UI.
2. Backend - Python with Django for back-end API.
3. Database - PostgreSQL to store the url pairs and click count.
4. Cache - Memcached to cache url pairs for faster redirects.
5. Message Queue - RabbitMQ to asynchronously increment click count in database.
6. Reverse Proxy - Nginx to serve the application.

How to run

The app is packaged into a docker compose container for easy startup and deployment.

Local development

1. Install docker compose
2. Clone this repository

   git clone https://github.com/colin-ho/URL-Shortener.git

3. Run docker-compose -f docker-compose-dev.yml up
4. Open the app at http://localhost:3000/

AWS deployment

This web app has been configured for easy AWS ECS deployment using AWS Fargate. This step requires an AWS account and IAM permissions. More info here

1. Create a docker compose ecs context

   docker context create ecs myecscontext
   docker context use myecscontext

2. Run docker compose -f docker-compose-prod.yml up
3. Check the application url with docker-compose -f docker-compose-prod.yml ps