URL-GO is a website with a GO backend and a Javascript frontend where users can shorten a URL and share it with ease. The vision for this site is to have users who enter the website be presented with an input prompt and an option to select when the link expires. There will also be a page that displays statistics for popular links.
The application will conist of three main components:
- Javascript frontend for users to interact with, framework TBD.
- URL service where long URLs will be converted to short URLs and vice versa.
- Postresql database to store a data related to short URLs.
Stretch Goals:
- Analytics service that tracks statistics for popular links.
- Redis cache to speed up URL redirects for frequently visited short URLs
graph TD;
frontend-->url-service;
url-service-->database;
For this project I went with SQL instead of NoSQL due to two reasons. I originally intended to use this as an opportunity to learn GORM and also reasoned that the relational nature of the analytics service may benefit from it. If I were to redo this project I would likely just select Redis due to its ease of use, lower latency and scalability.
| URL | |
|---|---|
| hash (PK) | char(7) NOT NULL |
| raw_url | varchar(255) NOT NULL |
| created_date | timestamp NOT NULL |
To generate a short URL, we will
-
Take the MD5 hash of the original URL + timestamp.
- MD5 is a widely used hashing function that produces a 128-bit hash value
-
Base 62 encode the MD5 hash and take the first 7 characters
- This results in 62^7 possible values, should easily be able to handle whatever is thrown at us.
- Add Changelog
- Give users the ability to customize URLs
- On the frontend, store the URLs created by the user in local storage for easy retrieval
- Add analytics service
For the frontend, create a .env file in /frontend and set PUBLIC_URLAPI=localhost:[port].
Then simply npm install and npm run dev.
For the backend, run go mod download && go mod verify and then go run main.go in the root directory. You will need to set env variables referenced in the config layer.
Docker build commands
docker build -t backend:latest . \
--build-arg PORT=$LISTENING_PORT \
--build-arg DB_HOST=$DATABASE_HOST \
--build-arg DB_USER=$DATABASE_USER \
--build-arg DB_PASS=$DATABASE_PASSWORD