Overview

This is a lightweight Node.js server for resolving pre-defined short links (also known as "go links"). For example, this server can redirect the URL http://yourdomain.com/gl to https://google.com, where one can choose the keyword ("gl") that is easy to remember, instead of using a random string as in other "URL shortener" services. You can read more about the history of go links here.

One can add/remove/modify links by simply editing a Google Sheet file and using the provided script to download and load it in memory, which should be good enough for personal use. One can optionally implement a front-end and an actual DB backend for a more sophisticated setup.

Prerequisite

You need to have a domain name (preferably a short one) and a virtual/physical machine that can be used as a web server.

Installation

First install Node.js and NPM following the instruction here. For example, you can run the following commands in Ubuntu/Debian to install Node.js v22.x:

$ curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_22.x | sudo -E bash -
$ sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

Install nodemon:

$ sudo npm install -g nodemon

Create a Google Sheet with two columns. The first column should have the URL key and the second column should have the URL. Make the Google Sheet publicly accessible and save the sheet ID in sheet_id.txt file. The sheet ID can be found in the URL: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/{sheet_id}/edit

Now run run_server.sh. This will download the Sheet as a CSV file in server/data/db.csv. Ignore the error message from npm start.

Install packages and run server:

$ cd server
$ npm install
$ npm start

You can test if the server works by accessing http://localhost:7000/api/item/gl (it should redirect to google.com) locally.

The final step is setting up a web server, for example Nginx, to redirect payload. If you don't have Nginx you can install it with sudo apt install nginx.

Open /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default with a text editor and add the following lines in the default server configuration (replace yourdomain.com with your own domain), right after the server_name _; line for example:

location ~* "^/[0-9a-z@]*$"  {
    rewrite ^/(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com:7000/api/item/$1 redirect;
}

Now, restart Nginx with sudo service nginx restart and try http://yourdomain.com/gl and see if that redirects you to google.com.

Note that if your server is in a remote machine and if you started the server in SSH, closing the SSH session will terminate the server. I recommend running the server in a tmux session to keep it running (alternatively you can use nohup).

Acknowledgement

The code in this repo was partially inspired by https://codeburst.io/creating-custom-url-shortener-with-nodejs-de10bbbb89c7.