A custom URL shortener service, built with Rails.
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Ruby version: 2.5.1
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Rails version: 5.2.1
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Database: PostgreSQL
Send a post request to the lilurl endpoint passing in your long url as ?url=LONG-URL-HERE.
Example with Postman:
The return value then looks like:
{
"id": 1,
"original": "https://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html",
"shortened": "I1dWHY",
"title": "Getting Started with Rails — Ruby on Rails Guides",
"clicks": 0,
"created_at": "2018-12-03T03:20:23.938-05:00",
"updated_at": "2018-12-03T03:20:23.938-05:00"
}The response holds the database ID number, the original url, the shortened url hash, the title of the url document, the number of clicks or number of times the shortened form has been used, and finally the timestamps.
Send a get request to the lilurl endpoint passing the shortened url to be redirected to the original url.
Example with Postman:
Here we used the shortend hash value DQVHRM and were redirected to the original link "https://tour.golang.org/basics/6". This is the custom URL generator in action!
The root route to urls#index returns a json response of all the urls, listed in order from most popular to least popular. The popularity is determined by the number of clicks the shortened version of the URL has. Note: some urls were entered into the database before the implementation of the "fetch title" background job and as such do not have titles.
urls#index
The algorithm to hash the long-form url is custom made and very simple. It isn't perfect and can be improved upon but is a good starting point for a minimum viable product. The short-form url is a 6-character autogenerated code selected from an array of 49 characters. The possible characters are 0-9, A-Z, and a-m. Each character is selected with replacement, resulting in about 13.9 million different combinations.