shortener's Introduction

URL shortener POC

This is a URL shortener proof-of-concept.

Details

Usage

To try the "production" version deployed on Heroku, run make prodpost. This will post a URL (with curl) to the app and it should return a short URL. Visiting the short URL should redirect to the original one:

NOTE: the Heroku dyno might be in a sleeping state, so the first request might take a few seconds.

make prodpost
Posting https://xkcd.com/1313?long-long-long-url to the shortener service..
The resulting short URL:
https://urlshrtr.herokuapp.com/2

 curl https://urlshrtr.herokuapp.com/2
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">
<title>Redirecting...</title>
<h1>Redirecting...</h1>
<p>You should be redirected automatically to target URL: <a href="b'https://xkcd.com/1313?long-long-long-url'">b'https://xkcd.com/1313'</a>.  If not click the link.

Running it locally

Python3 is required for the code to run.

To install the dependencies:

make install

make run

make post
Posting https://xkcd.com/814 to the shortener service..
The resulting short URL:
http://127.0.0.1:5000/1

Implementation

Language: Python
Web framework: Flask
Data store: Redis
Cloud platform: Heroku

Shortcomings

code-related

Things related to the code that would be essential in a production setting:

Testing is only for the happy path - edge cases should be tested
Logging is minimal. More verbose logging would be beneficial.
Exception handling is not very thorough.

infra-related

Things related to the deployment of the service:

load balancing - such a service must have multiple replicas behind a load balancer in production.
monitoring - request rate, error rate, request latency, Redis memory usage would be some aspects which would have to be monitored
rate limiting would be nice (based on user agent, IP, or other fingerprints)

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