Link Shortener

This project is an over-engineered Link Shortener built using as many AWS services as was reasonably possible. An example deployment of this is available on https://beano.dev.

Usage

Deploy

Before running the deployment, you must manually create a certificate for your domain in us-east-1 and configure SES and Route 53 in a region of your choice. Unless you request a usage limit increase from AWS, you will need to manually verify your email within SES. You will also need to set the following environment variables on the deploying machine.

Variable	Value
ADMIN_CONTACT	The email address for updates to be sent to
DOMAIN	The domain your shortener will be hosted on
FALLBACK_URL	The URL to redirect to in the absence of a specifically defined one
AWS_REGION	The region to deploy to
SES_REGION	The region where you have configured SES

npm install
serverless create_domain --stage prod # This only needs to be run once but may take up to 40 mins
serverless deploy --stage prod

Database

The database used is DynamoDB, below can be seen an example record which would redirect from /blog to https://blog.daniel-milnes.uk.

{
  "code": "blog",
  "url": "https://blog.daniel-milnes.uk",
  "uses": {
    "lifetime": 0,
    "recent": 0
  }
}

Emails

Link Shortener tracks two values for usage, lifetime and recent. The recent key is cleared every time a usage summary is generated. A summary will be sent to the email defined in the ADMIN_CONTACT environment variable every 24 hours when there has been use, or when an authorized user POSTs to /email. The email can also be previewed on /email.

System Diagrams

Deployment

Shortener

Email

Endpoints

Endpoints with the 🔑 emoji require the X-Api-Key header.

GET - /

Redirect to the url defined in FALLBACK_URL.

GET - /{id}

Follow a redirect rule. If no rule for the URL requested is found, a redirect to FALLBACK_URL will be sent.

GET - /manage 🔑

Get information about a redirect route. If the code= parameter is not included or has no value, details about all routes will be shown.

PUT - /manage 🔑

Create a redirect route.

Request body

{
    "code": "",
    "url": ""
}

DELETE - /manage 🔑

Delete a redirect route.

Request body

{
    "code": ""
}

GET - /email 🔑

Preview the summary email.

POST - /email 🔑

Trigger a summary email.

GET - /robots.txt

To prevent search engines trying to crawl the link shortener.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

GET - /favicon.ico

Returns 404 to prevent the browser trying to load the favicon and being redirected to FALLBACK_URL