An URL shortener written in Golang

Inspired by Mathias Bynens' PHP URL Shortener, and triggered by a wish to learn Go, I wanted to try and see if I could build an URL shortener in Go.

Features

• Redirect to your main website when no slug, or incorrect slug, is entered, e.g. http://wiere.ma/ → http://samwierema.nl/.
• Generates short URLs using only [a-z0-9] characters.
• Doesn’t create multiple short URLs when you try to shorten the same URL. In this case, the script will simply return the existing short URL for that long URL.
• Can import old bitly links

Installation

1. git clone git@github.com:breyten/go-url-shortener.git
2. cd go-url-shortener/docker
3. Create a config file named config.(json|yaml|toml). Use config-example.json as a example.
4. ./run.sh
5. docker-compose up -d
6. Forward requests from your load balancer to the gus_web_1 container (port 8080)

To-do

• Add tests
• Add checks for duplicate slugs (i.e. make creation of slugs better)

Author

• Breyten Ernsting
• Sam Wierema