What is this?

William Shatner is a URL shortener written in JavaScript. This is just a quick side project used to practice a few skills across the full web stack. Is using ES6, React/Redux, a VM manager for the local dev environment, and an automated testing/building/deployment system a little overkill for a project of this size? Yes. Absolutely. Was it fun to build? Heck yeah!

GitHub Source: https://github.com/ninjascribble/williamshatner

Build Status:

Building the project

William Shatner requires NodeJS 6.3+. It takes advantage of a number of ES6 features that are not available in prior versions. For the best experience you'll also want to have both VirtualBox and Vagrant installed. Then just run make, let the build process complete, and visit your local version at http://localhost:8080.

A note about Vagrant

Vagrant is a virtual machine manager that allows filesystem sharing between a host and the VM. If this is your first time using it, then expect it to take a while to download the base VM image. Once the image has been downloaded a VM will be created and provisioned, and you'll be ready to go. This project has only been tested on OS X El Capitan. Your mileage may vary.

Some helpful make targets

• default: Installs dependencies, runs tests, builds the client-side code, and starts/provisions the virtual machine.
• test: Runs all tests
• client.dev: Compiles the client-side code for dev. Includes source maps. The client-side code is recompiled any time a file is changed and saved.
• client.build: Compiles the client-side code for production. Minified, uglified, and ready to ship.
• server.restart: Restarts the NodeJS service. Run this whenever you want to deploy server-side changes.
• server.logs: Tails the server logs.
• vm.deploy: Test the deploy process against your VM. This is useful prior to committing changes that will be picked up and deployed by the CI service.

Tools used

Client-side

• React
• Redux
• Bootstrap
• Sass
• Babel
• Webpack

Server-side

• NodeJS
• Express

Databases

• MongoDb

Deployment & Hosting

• CircleCI
• DigitalOcean

Todo

William Shatner is a side project, and not really meant for production use. A few things that would love some love include:

• More test coverage
• A list of URLs the current user has shortened
• A list of popular/recent URLs
• Websocket support:
  • See popular/recent URLs in real-time
  • See click counts in real-time