tinyurl is a bare bones url shortening tool written in C++ and bash script. The redirects are handled by a C++ program (using FastCGI protocol) and managing url's is done with the bash script.

I wrote this tool to see just how simple it would be to write the most basic url shortener. There is nothing fancy going on here: long url's are stored in files, minimal error handling (404 Not Found and 400 Bad Request), no hit tracking.

I chose to write a raw CGI program instead of using a higher level scripting language due to simplicity of the app. This also means that requirements are simple; just a competent HTTP server capable of running FastCGI programs.

Building

• install FastCGI
• modify Makefile settings as necessary (see Buildtime settings)
• run make
• copy tinyurl.fcgi to your web directory
• copy tinyurl script to somewhere in the path, eg: ~/bin

Buildtime settings

Makefile has a few settings that should be tweaked to suit your server:

• SCRIPT_URL: full url to tinyurl.fcgi (including trailing forward slash)
• DATA_DIR: directory where shortened url's are stored
• TOKEN_LEN: length of auto-generated url ID's

Apache settings

Install and enable mod_fcgid.

Optionally use the following .htaccess to rewrite all requests in a given directory/location to the tinyurl.fcgi script. If tinyurl.fcgi is in a location other than the root of the domain adjust the path in ReweriteRule appropriately.

Options +ExecCGI
AddHandler fcgid-script .fcgi

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /tinyurl.fcgi/$1 [L]