Free Code Camp: Backend Project 3 - URL Shortener Microservice

URL Shortener Microservice

The aim of this project was to build a small web app with functionality similar to: https://url-shortener-microservice.freecodecamp.rocks

The project was built using the following technologies:

HTML
JavaScript with Node.js / NPM for package management.
Express web framework to build the web API.
mongoose for MongoDB object modeling, interacting with a MongoDB Atlas database.
Bootstrap for styling with some custom CSS.
FontAwesome for icons.
nodemon for automatic restarting of server during development.

Project Requirements:

User Story #1: You can POST a URL to /api/shorturl and get a JSON response with original_url and short_url properties. Here's an example: { original_url : 'https://freeCodeCamp.org', short_url : 1}
User Story #2: When you visit /api/shorturl/<short_url>, you will be redirected to the original URL.
User Story #3: If you pass an invalid URL that doesn't follow the valid http://www.example.com format, the JSON response will contain { error: 'invalid url' }

Project Writeup:

The third Free Code Camp: Back End Development Project is a URL shortener microservice. Users can:

Submit a URL to be shortened using the form on the app home page, or by sending a POST request to /api/shorturl with a urlencoded body containing the field 'url' containing a valid URL.
Be redirected to the original URL by sending a GET request to /api/shorturl/<SHORT_URL> where SHORT_URL is the short_url string returned via JSON when a URL to be shortened is submitted.

Shortened URL records are stored in a MongoDB database, and expire after 24hrs.

Project Files:

index.js - the main entry point of the application, an express web server handling the routes defined in the specification.
public/ - contains static files for the web app (stylesheet, logo, favicons etc), served by express using express.static().
views/ - contains the single html page for the web app, index.html, which is served by express on GET requests to /.
middleware/ - contains express middleware functions used by the two major routes of the express server.
models/ - contains mongoose schema and models for the database interactions of the app.
helpers/ - contains two small helper files used by some of the middleware functions.

Usage:

Requires Node.js / NPM in order to install required packages. After downloading the repo, install required dependencies with:

npm install

To run the app locally, a valid MongoDB database URI is required to be entered as an environmental variable (MONGO_URI), which can be done via a .env file (see sample.env). One possible MongoDB service is MongoDB Atlas.

A development mode (with auto server restart on file save), can be started with:

npm run dev

The application can then be viewed at http://localhost:3000/ in the browser.

To start the server without auto-restart on file save:

npm start

URL Shortener Microservice BoilerPlate

The initial boilerplate for this app can be found at https://url-shortener-microservice.freecodecamp.rocks/

Instructions for building the project can be found at https://www.freecodecamp.org/learn/back-end-development-and-apis/back-end-development-and-apis-projects/url-shortener-microservice

PLCoster / fcc_backend_project3