betkom / url_shortener

An application to acts as a bit.ly-like URL shortener

README

This README would normally document whatever steps are necessary to get the application up and running.

Getting Started

First, things you will want to install

with homebrew:

• postgresql (latest version should be fine)
• ruby (version is ruby 2.6.4)
• rails (version is rails 6.0.2.2)

Ensure config/database.yml is in place and properly configured. Example can be found in config/database.example.yml

Run rake db:migrate . The Database will be empty

Run the app with rails s and then you can just access the environment at http://localhost:3000

Running tests

Run rspec

URLs

• POST /url/shorten
• GET <shortened_url>/stats
• GET /stats

Shorten a url

To shorten a url

curl "https://betkom-shortener.herokuapp.com/url/shorten" \
  -d '{
    "base_url: the url you want to shorten, 
    custom_slug: the custom string you want the url to have"
  }'

The base_url is the url you want to shorten custom_slug the custom string you want the url to have if wanted The above command will return a response like this:

https://betkom-shortener.herokuapp.com/u/<custom_slug or unique random string>

To shorten a url, use

HTTP Request

POST https://betkom-shortener.herokuapp.com/url/shorten

Query Parameters

Parameter	Description
base_url	The url you want to shorten (required)
custom_slug	the string you want to append to end of shortened url (optional)

Retrieve a shortened url stats

To retrieve a shortened url stats

curl "https://betkom-shortener.herokuapp.com/u/test"

The above command will return a response like this:

{
    "total_visits": 2,
    "created_at": "2020/03/27"
}

To retrieve a single shortened url stats, use

HTTP Request

GET https://betkom-shortener.herokuapp.com/u/test

Retrieve global stats

To retrieve a global stats

curl "https://betkom-shortener.herokuapp.com/stats"

The above command will return a response like this:

{
  "total_visits": {
      "https://www.bbc.com/news": 2
  }
}

To retrieve global stats, use

HTTP Request

GET https://betkom-shortener.herokuapp.com/u/test

Design Decisions

• Used rails because it's faster to get an api up and running
• Used PostgreSQL because Rails has better out of the box support for it over MySQL
• Because multiple custom short links can map to the same base url, decided to use a 1 to many association to model this
• Used a jsonb structure to save each path's stats because it's easy to work with for aggregation and also makes it easy to store total number of clicks per day for each path