quickshort

A shortener made for hand-typed URLs, from flyers and handouts for human subjects studies. Small, simple, does not require a database — shortened URLs and logs are stored in text files. Requires python 3.7 or higher.

Removes any non-alphanumeric characters from incoming URLs, and changes everything to lower case. Merges URL parameters — see Examples below.

For logging, quickshort stores hit counts both as a single number and individual entries. Hit counts and logs can optionally be given HTTP endpoints.

A demo of this project is available on Glitch.

Examples

/foo-bar /Foo_Bar /FOOBAR

will all look for a redirection file called foobar. If foobar contains https://example.com?a=b, then:

/foo-bar?a=c&d=e

will redirect to https://example.com?a=b&d=e

Running

1. Clone this
2. pip install -r requirements.txt
3. export REDIRECTS_PATH=<somewhere you control>
4. Optionally export HITCOUNT_PATH and LOG_PATH
5. If you want to serve hit counts and logs over HTTP, export SERVE_LOGS
6. Create a file in $REDIRECTS_PATH named with the redirection key you want. Only lowercase letters and numbers are allowed.
7. In that file, put the target URL
8. Start the flask server, it will create $REDIRECTS_PATH/hits
9. Any hits to that server will look in $REDIRECTS_PATH/<normalized_path> and redirect to the new destination
10. In production, do whatever you need to to get it running all nice
11. Set the GUNICORN_LOGGING environment variable to use gunicorn's logging settings