shrinkly - shrink your URLs

Overview

This project is a backend API for a URL shortener service with advanced features including:

• URL Shortening with custom short codes
• Analytics for tracking visits
• Caching for optimizing performance
• API Rate Limiting to prevent abuse
• Background Jobs for updating and maintaing Analytics

The API is designed to be robust, scalable, and easy to integrate with other services.

Table of Contents

• Getting Started
• API Endpoints
• Redis Caching
• API Rate Limiting
• Background Workers

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Node.js and npm
• MongoDB
• Redis (for caching and queue)
• bullmq (for queues and background workers)

Installation

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/hritik-hk/shrinkly.git
   cd shrinkly

2. Install dependencies:

  npm install

3. Set up environment variables in a .env file:

DB_URL=<your-mongodb-uri>
REDIS_URL=<your-redis-url>
PORT=8080

API Endpoints

POST /random

Request body:

{
  "originalUrl": "https://example.com",
}

POST /custom

Request body:

{
  "originalUrl": "https://example.com",
  "customCode": "mycodex", 
}

GET /:shortCode

Redirect to the original URL and track analytics. Response: -302 Redirect to the original URL -404 if the URL does not exist

GET /analytics/:shortCode

Response:

{
 "deviceTypes": {
    "desktop": number,
    "mobile": number
  },
shortCode": string,
  "originalUrl":  string,
  "totalVisits": number,
  "uniqueVisits": number,
  "visitHistory": {"clientIp":string, "timeStamp":datetime, "userAgent":string}[]
}

Redis Caching

• caches frequency used results in memory redis database/store

API Rate Limiting

• API rate limiting on basis of requested URL and IP address
• used redis to maintain request count and TTL

Background Workers

• processes jobs/updates from queue and updates database asynchronously
• implemented using bullmq