sclr.ac - Scaler's Official URL Shortener

[championswimmer]

sclr.ac

sclr.ac is Scaler's official URL shortener - it will be used to create shortlinks for masterclasses, events, referral links etc.

Details

Repositories

• backend
  • alt new backend
• frontend

Maintainers

• Arnav Gupta

Summary

The URL shorten-er project - sclr.ac works like common URL shortening services like http://bit.ly or http://goo.gl etc.

People can -

• Create shortcodes for their URLs (which are randomly generated 5 digit alphanumeric)
• Create custom shortcodes (like /mycode) for their URLs

There would be stats available for how many times each shortlink has been opened. Also the traffic stats will have details of the referrer URL (which gives information on where the traffic is coming from).

Features (future)

• Can links expire ?
  • Expire if hits < X && created more than Y days ago (eg: expire unused links after 1 month)
• Subscriptions
  • Free account = 5 short codes
  • Lite Account = 20 short codes / month
  • Pro Account = Unlimited short codes

Tech Specs

Entities

Base Entity

Every entity extends from this (i.e. all tables have these columns)

• id : integer autoincrement
• createdAt: date
• updatedAt: date

URLs

• id: bigint (basically base64 representation of shortCode)
• longUrl: string - the actual HTTP url which we are shortening
• shortCode: string - the shortened string
• ownerId: id of user who created it
• hits: big int

eg: if https://medium.com/@championswimmer is shortened to https://sclr.ac/agm then agm is the shortCode

Visits

• urlId: id of shortcode which was visited
• ipAddr: string - IP address of visiting user
• referrer: string - the previous website someone was visiting

Users

• username: string
• email: string
• auth: ???

API Endpoints

Legend	Meaning
⚠️	Temporary, not for prod
🔐	Needs authentication
👮	Admins are allowed
🧑	Only users' own info (if they have created that entity)
📄	Has pagination

POST /users/ ⚠️

Register a new user with email/password

POST /users/login ⚠️

Login a new user with email/password

GET /users/login

Redirect to Google for Google Oauth

GET /users/login/callback

Callback from Google for Oauth

POST /urls/ 🔐

Create a new shortened URL

For getting random short code

{
	"longUrl": "https://example.com/mysite/?some=query"
}

For getting custom short code

{
	"longUrl": "https://example.com/mysite/?some=query",
	"shortCode": "mylink" 
}

GET /urls 🔐 📄

Shows all short URLs

• For admins, shows ALL urls on our system
• For normal users shows only urls they have created

GET https://sclr.ac/urls?contains=google 

Should show all URLs that have "google" in their longUrl 

GET /urls/{shortCode} 🔐👮🧑

Get details of a short code (like its long URL, no of hits etc)

PATCH /urls/{shortCode} 🔐👮🧑

Update details of a shortCode (for now mainly to update the long URL)

GET /{shortCode}

‼️ This is not really an API endpoint
This will redirect the user to the longUrl. People will use this endpoint directly from the browser

GET /users/me 🔐

See my profile details

PATCH /users/me

Update my profile details (if any)

Shortening Logic

Given long URL: https://github.com/scaleracademy/open-source-projects/discussions/3
We need a short code: https://sclr.ac/gbv6j i.e. gbv6j

Shortcode requirements:

• Contains A-Z, a-z, 0-9 _ and -
• Length: 8
• DB data type: VARCHAR(8)

0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ_-
64^8 == 2^X

Take gbv6j as a base64 representation, convert it to an integer and we'll use that as the id of our URLs table.

[harikanani]

Do we need link expiration fetures or not?

[kunwar97]

@championswimmer I have some ideas:

1. Add Authentication & My Urls module
2. LRU Caching on backend for less latency

Let me know if i can start working on these features