This is a simple URL shortener developed in the Rust programming language.

Code status

Setup and usage

First, you'll want to install the Rust toolchain.

curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh

Then, clone this repository.

git clone git@github.com:fbecart/url-shortener.git
cd url-shortener

Finally, use Cargo to test, run or build the project locally.

# Run the tests
cargo test

# Compile and run the program
cargo run

# Generate an optimized binary located at target/release/url-shortener
cargo build --release

What is actually implemented?

Once launched, the server will generate short URLs.

curl -i -X POST --data "url=https://www.helloclue.com/" http://localhost:3000

The short URL will be returned as HTTP header Location.

HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Content-Length: 0
Location: http://localhost:3000/JqC6S
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2016 20:31:35 GMT

Then, the short URL can be queried very simply using a GET or HEAD HTTP request.

curl -i http://localhost:3000/JqC6S

If the short URL exists, the response will be a redirection to the longer URL.

HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Location: https://www.helloclue.com/
Content-Length: 0
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2016 20:31:56 GMT

The port of the server can be configured by environment variable (default value is 3000).

export PORT=8080

The prefix of the short URLs can be defined with an environment variable (default value is http://localhost:3000/). This will affect the Location header of in the response of successful POST requests.

export SHORT_URL_PREFIX=https://bit.ly/

Short URLs are persisted on a simple text file. The location of this file can be configured by environment variable (default value is short.urls).

export DATA_FILE=/var/url-shortener/short.urls

Why Rust?

I'm interested by this language for many reasons that I will not describe here.

I don't have so much experience with it yet, and I'm always looking for new opportunities to experiment.

Lessons learned

Overall that was a great coding experience. The language seems simple and intuitive, with very powerful features. The compiler is awesome, and usually, if it compiles, it will run the way you expected.

Despite the Rust promises of being extremely efficient (at execution), some basic libraries are still missing for this specific problem. A high-level async Web framework would have been great, as well as an efficient concurrent HashMap.

Because I'm new to the language, I obviously struggled on very simple things. There are really cool features I definitely need to understand better, such as higher order functions.