Shortens URLs by taking translating database indexes to a radix-56 representation with a character set that improves readability.
For a live demo, see https://hur.wtf (for proper TLS, please use https://url-shortening-app.herokuapp.com/). The demo runs on a free heroku dyno, which means that the dyno sleeps when not used and takes some time to restart.
Python 3 & virtualenv (recommended)
Clone the repository and cd into the directory:
git clone https://github.com/hur/urlshort.git
cd urlshort
Set up a virtual environment:
virtualenv venv
Activate the virtual environment:
(Windows / CMD):
venv\Scripts\activate
(Mac OS / Unix):
source venv/bin/activate
Install requirements:
pip install -r requirements.txt
Set up .env file with your secret key
SECRET_KEY = "yoursecretkey"
You can generate a random secret key using Python:
>>> import uuid
>>> uuid.uuid4().hex
Configure your environment variables and config.py to suit your needs, e.g.
if you wish to use a different database url.
It is recommended to set the URL environment variable to whatever url you are running the app in
(e.g. http://127.0.0.1:5000)
so that the app can provide correct output.
To initialize the database, use
flask createdb
Run the app using flask run. In some cases using python -m flask run instead may resolve issues that occur with flask run.
For running all tests, use py.test