christopherhesse / go-alias

Service for quickly aliasing and redirecting to long URLs

Use this service to quickly alias and redirect to long URLs (demo)

Setup

Server setup

Recommended to use Heroku to host the service if you don't care about security. Should take about 5 minutes to stand up. Otherwise you can put it on a Kubernetes cluster.

1. Create a Firebase project
2. Export Firebase creds on your Firebase service account as a json file
3. Create a new Heroku app and connect it to this git repo or your fork of it
4. Make json file's creds available as environment variables in your deployment environment (eg. through Heroku dashboard)
   • FIREBASE_PROJECT_ID
   • FIREBASE_CLIENT_EMAIL
   • FIREBASE_DATABASE_NAME
   • FIREBASE_PRIVATE_KEY which can have literal \n instead of actual newlines
5. Deploy!

Client setup

Add this site to your Chrome search engines by scrolling down until you see three empty boxes. Enter values go, go, and go.corp.mycompany.com/%s, respectively.

Advanced setup

To get the most benefit from the service, you should setup a DNS entry on your local network, go.corp.mycompany.com. Make sure that corp.mycompany.com is in the search domains for each user on the network. This is usually easily accomplished by configuring your DHCP server. Now, simply typing go into your browser should take you to the service, where you can register shortcuts. Those shortcuts will also be available by typing go/shortcut.

On a mac, you can add the domain to your DNS search paths

networksetup -setsearchdomains Wi-Fi corp.example.com

However, this will require all bare names to hang instead of failing instantly, so you may wish to stick with the Chrome-only solution.

Use

When you type in the Chrome URL bar go<TAB> anything you type afterwards will bring you to that alias here. You can then paste your link in the box and the next time you visit this alias, it will bring you straight to the site you pasted before.

You can override any alias by visiting eg., #{path}/myalias/mynewsite.com

Develop

Export your firebase credentials as appropriate environment variables. You'll need:

• FIREBASE_PROJECT_ID
• FIREBASE_CLIENT_EMAIL
• FIREBASE_DATABASE_NAME
• FIREBASE_PRIVATE_KEY which can have literal \n instead of actual newlines

npm install
npm install -g devtool
npm run dev

Visit http://localhost:3000/myalias

Test in docker

make run

Deploy

kubectl apply -f kube/api-deployment.yaml
kubectl apply -f kube/api-svc.yaml