Send a POST request to https://damp-brushlands-93308.herokuapp.com/api/new with the following JSON payload:
{"long": "<long url here>}
The server will create the minified url and return the following JSON:
{
"miniurl": "<minified url here>",
"long": "<long url here>",
"hits": <number of times link was used>
}
note that the URL should be valid. If http:// or https:// are not present, they will be added
The miniurl on this request will include the entire url (ie. https://damp-brushlands-93308.herokuapp.com/<miniurl>). This will redirect you to the original url and increment the number of hits on that mini.
To get statistics on your minified url, send a POST request to https://damp-brushlands-93308.herokuapp.com/api/current with the following payload:
{"miniurl": "<minified url here>"}
This will return the following JSON:
{
"miniurl": "<minified url here>",
"long": "<long url here>",
"hits": <number of times link was used>
}
GODEPS is used for the dependency management. In order to connect to MongoDB, you must add MONGOURI(uri to connect to the database), DBNAME(the name of the database to connect to), and DBCOL(the name of the collection you are connecting to) to your enviornment variables.
This tool is designed to take in URLs and make them smaller. The original long URL is run through a 32 bit Fowler–Noll–Vo hashing function. This hash is then encoded in URL safe base64. The reason for using a 32 bit hasing function rather than a larger one (ie 128/256) is that it will produce only 6 characters when base64 encoded. This makes it a reasonable length for a small URL.
MongoDB was used as the database simply because it is easy to set up and this project deals with passing JSON around which made it a good fit.
Collision handling was given thought, although due to the scope of the project and who would be using it there is a very small chance collison would happen (first collision would be expected around with around 2^16 entries, or 65,536 unique URLs).