misaelnieto / mallonga

This is the classic url shortener app, written in django and featuring, TDD first

Mallonga - Noe's url shortener

Hello, this repo contains a Django app that implements the logic of a very simple url shortener. I wrote this as a part of a job interview, so this was an excellent oportunity to hone my skills with TDD, BDD and GitHub Actions.

For users of the demo

If you want to use the demo site, just go to https://eta.noenieto.com/ and paste some url on the form and hit the submit button.

These are the decision, tools and/or skills I used to develop this application:

• Sigh ... Four days. It took me that long to write it.
• Short code algorithm: Currently, a 8 digit string is being generated randomly, this gives us around 2.8 billion different codes. I researched a bit and we could use a FNV hash. This guy implemented it into a small Django application. There's also the short_url package available on PyPI. I ended up not implementing any of these two. We can do that later.
• Visual Studio. I'm a bit ashamed to say this, but it's a beautiful generic editor/IDE. Even better than Sublime.
• Malonga means short in Esperanto. I guess the right word to use would be: malongilo (-ilo means tool)
• TDD First. I really could do it. Models, views, templates, fixtures and so were written after the tests. As of now I'm really proud of it. I did this in several steps; take a look at the commits if you want to see what these steps look like.
• Pipenv. I never liked the requirements.txt thingie anyway.
• BeautifulSoup: I could write all the application with only one extra library. I had to pull the title page of the shortened url and I could have used python's HtmlParser, but I felt a bit lazy, so I just pulled BeautifulSoup and called it a day.
• You can check the demo on this link. If you are curious what type of server I'm using, I'll let you know the server is opalstack (written by some guys who used to workfor webfaction). So no fancy serverless or Heroku, sorry to dissapoint.
• Plain Django for testing. No pytest nor tox this time.
• Github actions to automate tests whatnot. It's a WIP, though.

Installation on your server

• Clone this repo.
• Install Pipenv
• cd into the repo, run pipenv install.
• Now configure mallonga as a wsgi app for your server. Take a look at the Django documentation on how install a Django app for different approaches.
  • Database: As a demo, the application can run with a SQLite database.
  • No configuration for static files is needed.
  • No configuration for media files is needed as well.
  • Configure the cron job for

Install locally

• Clone this repo.
• Make sure you have Pipenv installed.
• cd into the repo, run pipenv install. To install the development tools also run: ./pipenv install --dev
• Create the database with ./manage.py migrate.
• Launch the development server: ./manage.py runserver and load http://localhost:8080/ on your browser.
• To run the tests: manage.py test.
• To run coverage: ???
• To run pep8 and pylint??
• To populate the DB with some data run: ./manage.py loaddata --app shortener links

TODO

[ ] There must be a background job that crawls the URL being shortened, pulls the <title> from the website and stores it.