flurl

flurl is a very simple URL shortener.

It is meant to use with programs like curl.

You POST to / and get a response with a random string which is the shortened URL.

It has only three endpoints:

• GET / to get the usage, similar to this README.
• GET /<url> to redirect to the original URL, if it exists.
• POST / to obtain a short URL (randomly generated) from the original one taken from the POST data.

Behind the scenes, the server gets the original URL from the POST data, uses the function token_urlsafe from the secrets package to generate a random URL string, and saves the mapping in a database.

Requirements

• validators package, install it with:

$ pip install validators

Installation

$ pip install -e .
$ export FLASK_APP=flurl
$ flask initdb
$ flask run

Usage

Assuming that the server is running on localhost port 5000.

$ curl localhost:5000
<usage>
$ curl -X POST -d <your-url> localhost:5000
<shortened url>
$ curl -L localhost:5000/<your-url>
<redirect to original url>