A naively simple URL shortener

Screenshot

Installation

Only *NIX systems are supported.

Runtime dependencies:

cURL
OpenSSL
SQLite

Build dependencies:

CMake
A C++23 compiler

Building from source

Clone the repo
Go into the repo directory, and run cmake -B build.
Run cmake --build build -j.
Pick a data directory where the database will be created.
Copy the templates and statics directories into the data directory.
Copy build/shrt into any directory that is in your $PATH.

Using pre-build binary

Download the binary from one of the releases.
Extract the downloaded tarball.
Continue to step 4 in "Building from source".

Arch Linux package

A PKGBUILD is provided in packages/arch in this repository.

Configuartion

By default, shrt looks for a configuration file at /etc/shrt.yaml. This path can be changed with the -c command line option. An example configuration file is printed below with comments.

# Specify the data directory you have picked.
data-dir: "/var/lib/shrt"
# The listening address. Example: localhost, 0.0.0.0, 127.0.0.1.
listen-address: localhost
# The port to listen to. If this is 0, the value of “listen-address”
# is treated as a path of a UNIX domain socket file.
listen-port: 8080
# The client ID of your shrt service. This is given by the OpenID
# Connect provider.
client-id: shrt
# The client secrete of your shrt service. This is given by the OpenID
# Connect provider.
client-secret: "abced12345"
# The initial URL of the OpenID Connect service.
openid-url-prefix: "https://auth.example.com/"
# The base URL of your shrt service. This is usually just “https://”
# followed by your domain name.
base-url: https://go.mws.rocks

Authentication

Shrt relies on an external OpenID Connect service provider for authentication. Usually you register your instance of shrt to the OpenID Connect provider. The provider will give you an client ID and a client secret (in this case your shrt server is the "client" of the OpenID Connect service). An OpenID Connect service has a number of endpoints, such as user info, tokens, etc. The URLs of those endpoints are discover by visiting a URL that is constructed from the URL in the configuration option openid-url-prefix, followed by .well-known/openid-configuration. For example, if you set openid-url-prefix to be https://auth.example.com/, the resulting URL would be

https://auth.example.com/.well-known/openid-configuration

This method works on KeyCloak, but I have never tested this on other OpenID Connect providers.

Base URL and shortcuts

For the configuration option base-url, usually this is just https:// followed by a domain that you own. Supposed you create a shortcut called "search" which points to https://google.com, you would be able to visit https://your.domain/search and be redirected to https://google.com. However you do not have to use a root URL under your domain. If you set base-url to https://your.domain/some/path, your shortcut would be at https://your.domain/some/path/search. I do not know why anybody would want this, but the capability is there.