🔪 sst-url-shortener

Host your own URL shortener on AWS with SST and chop up those beefy links in a breeze!

• 🔀 Add as a component to your existing SST app or deploy standalone and integrate with your JS/Python/Go backend via the OpenAPI sdk
• 🔒 Opt-in API bearer auth and Swagger docs UI
• ✨ URL search and expiration support
• 🏠 Bring your custom domain
• 💰 Serverless and fully within AWS Free Tier, 0 upfront cost

Pre-requisites

If this is your first time using SST or deploying to AWS, make sure you have the AWS credentials properly setup

Quickstart

Standalone SST app

This is for cases when you can't or don't want to integrate the URLShortener component into your existing SST app. Here we will create a new SST app and use an OpenAPI SDK to integrate with our backend deployed elsewhere.

• Create a new project:

mkdir my-shortener-app && cd my-shortener-app
npm init -y

• Init SST and install the URLShortener component:

npx sst@latest init
npm install @dizzzmas/sst-url-shortener

• Declare the URL shortener component in sst.config.ts:

/// <reference path="./.sst/platform/config.d.ts" />
import { UrlShortener } from "@dizzzmas/sst-url-shortener";

export default $config({
  app(input) {
    return {
      name: "url-shortener",
      removal: input?.stage === "production" ? "retain" : "remove",
      home: "aws",
    };
  },
  async run() {
    const urlShortener = new UrlShortener({})

    return {
      api: urlShortener.api.url,
    }
  },
});

• Deploy the app to your personal stage via SST dev mode:

npx sst dev

Notice that our app once deployed returns a URL of an API endpoint. By default the API doesn't require authentication and has Swagger UI enabled. We can visit {api}/ui to access the swagger UI and test our API.

Backend integration via OpenAPI SDK

SDKs are available for:

• JS
• Python
• Go

Below is an example of using the JS SDK to shorten a URL:

Install the SDK in your backend project

npm install @dizzzmas/sst-url-shortener-sdk

Use it:

import SstURLShortener from '@dizzzmas/sst-url-shortener-sdk';

const client = new SstURLShortener({
  baseURL: "YOUR_API_URL",
  bearerToken: undefined // auth disabled in this example
});

async function main() {
  const newUrl = await client.urls.create({
    originalUrl: "https://sst.dev/docs"
  });
  const shortUrl = newUrl.result.shortUrl;
  console.log(shortUrl);  // the shortened URL

  const urls = await client.urls.search({});
  console.log(urls.result);
}

main();

Add as a component to an existing SST app

Install the component:

npm install @dizzzmas/sst-url-shortener

Modify sst.config.ts to include the component:

import { UrlShortener } from "@dizzzmas/sst-url-shortener";

async run() {
  // ...your existing components
  const urlShortener = new UrlShortener({});

  // link URL shortener to another component e.g. a lambda function
  const example = new sst.aws.Function("Example", {
    link: [...urlShortener.link],
    handler: "example.handler",
    url: true,
  })
}

Inside the example.ts Lambda handler:

import { ShortUrl } from "@dizzzmas/sst-url-shortener"

export const handler = async () => {
  const { shortUrl } = await ShortUrl.create({
    originalUrl: "https://sst.dev/docs"
  })
  console.log("new short url", shortUrl)

  const searchResult = await ShortUrl.search({})
  console.log("search results", searchResult)

  return shortUrl
}

Component configuration

Authentication

API bearer authentication is disabled by default and can be enabled via setting enableApiAuth to true on the component.

const shortener = new UrlShortener({
  enableApiAuth: true,
})

Make sure you specify the Bearer token expected by the API for authentication.

The Bearer token can be set via UrlShortenerApiAuthKey SST Secret and defaults to your_secret

# set the secret
npx sst secret set UrlShortenerApiAuthKey "YOUR_TOKEN"

Swagger UI

Swagger UI is enabled by default and can be disabled via settings enableOpenApiDocs to false on the component.

const shortener = new UrlShortener({
  enableOpenApiDocs: false,
})

Custom domain

You can specify a custom domain for the URL shortener and its API.

const shortener = new UrlShortener({
  domain: {
    name: "share.acme.com",
    dns: sst.aws.dns()
  }
})

The above example will results in short URLs looking like https://share.acme.com/etogiyeu, and the API looking like https://api.share.acme.com/ui

Custom domains work out of the box if you use AWS Route53, Cloudflare or Vercel as your DNS provider, but will require manual setup for other providers. Please check out SST Custom Domains docs for more info.

Short id length

Short id is the alphanumeric identifier for your URLs generated using cuid2 e.g. in https://share.acme.com/etogiyeu the short id is etogiyeu

Its length can be anywhere from 4 to 24 characters and defaults to 8.

const shortener = new UrlShortener({
  shortIdLength: 12
})

Transform underlying resources

You can fully customize the underlying resources thanks to the SST Transform feature.

const shortener = new UrlShortener({
  transform: {
    redirectHandler: {
      function: {
        timeout: 30
      }
    }
  }
})