parabuzzle/linky repository overview

⁠Linky

Linky is your friendly internal URL shortener service.

This app is super simple to get up and running and makes managing intranet short links super simple!

⁠Why Linky?

While I was searching for an open source version of the kinds of intranet URL shorteners that I was used to using at companies around Silicon Valley, I found that there are a ton of URL shorteners out there but all of them are either over complicated or just a "proof of concept". Linky was built to serve as a simple, yet useful, URL shortener for use internally in company based on what I've observed as useful inside large organizations.

⁠Installation

⁠Requirements

You will need a postgres database to connect to.

⁠Heroku

Fork the code, push to Heroku.

⁠Docker

Run the container:

docker run -d -p 80:80 -e DB=your_database -e DB_USER=your_user -e DB_PASS=your_pass parabuzzle/linky

⁠Variables

• DB = hostname for the database
• DB_USER = the database username
• DB_PASS = the database password
• PORT = the application port to listen on

⁠Setup the Database

You need to create and setup the database on the first run:

rake db:create; rake db:migrate

or docker:

docker run -e DB=your_database -e DB_USER=your_user -e DB_PASS=your_pass parabuzzle/linky rake db:create; rake db:migrate

⁠Params Passing?

Params passing allows you to create fancier URL's by allowing you to specify a special redirect url when something is given after the initial short url.

As an example, let's say we have a short url known as twsearch that points to http://www.twitter.com/search... ok but then I've got to input my search when I get to the page... what if I could do http://go/twsearch/mysearch and it just executed the search? Well with params parsing you can! If I put http://www.twitter.com/search?q= in the optional params parsing field for the short url, it will split the twsearch/mysearch and pass the mysearch at the end of the url which would send you to http://www.twitter.com/search?q=mysearch automatically!

This feature is really useful for things like jira where you have a project like myproject linked with myjira which would send you to the dashboard but if you wanted to go directly to a ticket, you could do /myjira/TKT-123 which would use the ticket url. The possiblities are endless here!