An URL shortener written in Golang

Inspired by Mathias Bynens' PHP URL Shortener, and triggered by a wish to learn Go, I wanted to try and see if I could build an URL shortener in Go.

Features

• Redirect to your main website when no slug, or incorrect slug, is entered, e.g. http://wiere.ma/ → http://samwierema.nl/.
• Generates short URLs using only [a-z0-9] characters.
• Doesn’t create multiple short URLs when you try to shorten the same URL. In this case, the script will simply return the existing short URL for that long URL.

Installation

1. Download the source code and install it using the go install command.
2. Use database.sql to create the redirect table in a database of choice.
3. Create a config file in /path/to/.go-url-shortener/ named config.(json|yaml|toml). Use config-example.json as a example.
4. Run the program as a daemon using one of the many methods: write a script for upstart, init, use daemonize, Supervisord, Circus or just plain old nohup. You can even start (and manage) it in a screen session.
5. Adding the following configuration to Apache (make sure you've got mod_proxy enabled):

<VirtualHost *:80>
	ServerName your-short-domain.ext

	ProxyPreserveHost on
	ProxyPass / http://localhost:8080/
	ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:8080/
</VirtualHost>

Using the example init script

You will find an example init script in the scripts folder. To use, you must at least change the GOPATH line to point to your Go root path.

To-do

• Add tests

Author

• Sam Wierema