Overview

Modern URL shortener

Stack

• ASP.NET Core 3.1
• EntityFrameworkCore with PostgreSQL
• Docker (docker-compose)

How it works

/url/shorten - all you need to specify is the target URL that needs to get shortened. Example:

Request

{
  "target": "https://google.com/gokasokdoakdaaaaw123o"
}

Response

{
  "id": 4,
  "publicKey": "fe2a2e83-b666-4191-a6a9-17ca68f720aa",
  "createdAt": "2020-04-20T04:18:02.5759202Z",
  "target": "https://google.com/gokasokdoakdaaaaw123o",
  "shortUrl": "https://gkama.it/Ore3vvu17J"
}

Randomly generating a 10 character long alphanumeric string to append to the shorten url. This is done via the RandomString() method. It uses Span<T> and string.Create() as the main methods of string creation

GkamaURL Metadata

There is additional metadata that is stored in a separate table ccalled gkama_url_metadata. An example of such data is the domain, path, query, fragment, etc. It is extracted using C#'s System.Uri class. The logic converts the string URL to an System.Uri and extracts the information from it. Most of the fields are nullable as they're not always needed. Below is an example

{
  "id": 1,
  "urlId": 5,
  "publicKey": "d58bde73-dff6-457e-a2b3-f65eae2392e5",
  "createdAt": "2020-05-18T15:46:49.6928752Z",
  "scheme": null,
  "domain": "google.com",
  "port": 0,
  "path": null,
  "query": null,
  "fragment": null
}

Resources

• Adam Sitnik - Span - Introduction