Shortly

URL Shorteners are oddly popular. In addition to the big shorteners (tinyurl.com and bit.ly), there are now many other branded shorteners, including wp.me and youtu.be and goo.gl and nyti.ms and pep.si and t.co and...

There are many problems with URL shorteners, from scalability to latency to linkrot to fraud. In this project we will replicate this technology -- for educational purposes only.

Tech

cloud hosting e.g. Heroku
server-side code, e.g. NodeJS
server-side storage, e.g. Mongo

Stories

Canned Links

Given seed data mapping names to URLs in the following format,

{
    "btvca": "http://www.burlingtoncodeacademy.com/",
    "iccrm": "http://www.benjerry.com/"
}

When a web browser requests the URL path /icecream

Then the server should return a 301 Redirect response to http://www.benjerry.com/

Case Insensitivity

Given the above seed data

When a web browser requests the URL path /IceCream

Then the server should return a 301 Redirect response to http://www.benjerry.com/

Error Handling

Given that there is no path named bogus

When a web browser requests the path /bogus

Then the server should return a 404 Not Found response

Add Link

When a user visits the landing page

Then they should see a form with the following items: 1. a text field named link 2. a button titled "Shorten"

When they enter http://www.gardeners.com in the link field and click "Shorten"

Then they see a new URL, of the form:

<a id="shortlink" href="http://myapp.herokuapp.com/xyzzy">
  http://myapp.herokuapp.com/xyzzy
</a>

where xyzzy is a pseudorandom 5-character alphanumeric string

When a web browser requests the URL http://myapp.herokuapp.com/xyzzy

Then the server should return a 301 Redirect response to http://www.gardeners.com

Reuse Link

Given the above setup of a link to http://www.gardeners.com

When they enter http://www.gardeners.com again

Then they see the same short name (xyzzy in the example)