Shortener

I’ve wanted a custom URL shortener on jakrunzer.com for some time now. Recently I went and built a small service that does just that!

Check it out at cheryl.fun

The source code is available at github.com/coffee-cup/shortener.

The Stack

When starting this project, I really wanted to use Rust. I love the language but never end up using it for real projects. Not anymore!

I went with Rocket for the webserver. I’ve heard good things and from browsing the docs I liked how it handled state management and context throughout different routes.

For the actually shortener itself, I based my implementation off this blog post but extended it to store the mapping between short code and URL in Redis. The actual implementation is fairly simple.

impl Cache for RedisRepository {
    fn store(&mut self, url: &str) -> String {
        let keys: Vec<String> = self.con.keys("*").unwrap();
        let count = keys.len() as u64;
        let hashed = self.generator.encode(&[count]);

        let _: () = self.con.set(hashed.clone(), url).unwrap();

        hashed
    }

    fn lookup(&mut self, id: &str) -> Option<String> {
        let url: Option<String> = match self.con.get(id) {
            Ok(val) => Some(val),
            Err(_e) => None,
        };

        url
    }
}

Frontend

Normally my goto for frontend is Nextjs. But lately I’ve been really enjoying using Svelte, especially for smaller projects like this.

I use Rocket static files to serve the public directory on the / route and then use Rollup to bundle the Svelte into something deployable on the web. Tailwind is used to quickly style the site.