Dead-simple, super minimal URL shortener in C.
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Rewrite of my fork of link. Written in C using Mongoose.
Please access this project on my Gitea instance, NOT GitHub.
You can host this yourself.
Note: all commands here are done as root.
To build this project, you'll need a libc implementation (only tested with glibc), optionally a separate libcrypt implementation, and Git. Most Linux distributions should have all of these by default, but in case yours doesn't:
- pacman -S glibc libxcrypt git
- emerge --ask sys-libs/glibc dev-vcs/git
- apt install glibc git
git clone https://git.swurl.xyz/swirl/clink && cd clink
Compile:
make
Now, you need to install. NGINX and systemd files are provided in this project; you may choose not to install them.
For all install commands, you may optionally provide prefix
and DESTDIR
options. This is useful for packagers; i.e. for a PKGBUILD: make prefix=/usr DESTDIR=${pkgdir} install
.
Available install commands are as follows:
- make install
installs the executable, NGINX, and systemd files.
- make install-bin
installs the executable file.
- make install-systemd
installs the systemd file, as well as its environment file.
- make install-nginx
installs the NGINX file.
For example, on a non-systemd system using NGINX, you would run make install-bin install-nginx
.
If using systemd, change the environment file to reflect your desired options:
vim /etc/clink.conf
You can now enable and start the service:
systemctl enable --now clink
The server should now be running on localhost at port 8080.
An NGINX file is provided with this project. Sorry, no support for Apache or lighttpd or anything else; should've chosen a better HTTP server.
For this, you'll need NGINX (obviously), certbot, and its NGINX plugin. Most Linux distributions should have these in their repositories, i.e.:
- pacman -S nginx certbot-nginx
- emerge --ask www-servers/nginx app-crypt/certbot-nginx
- apt install nginx python-certbot-nginx
This section assumes you've already followed the last.
Change the domain in the NGINX file:
sed -i 's/your.doma.in/[DOMAIN HERE]' /etc/nginx/sites-available/clink
Enable the site:
ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-{available,enabled}/clink
Enable HTTPS for the site:
certbot --nginx -d [DOMAIN HERE]
Enable and start NGINX:
systemctl enable --now nginx
If it's already running, reload:
systemctl reload nginx
Your site should be running at https://your.doma.in. Test it by going there, and trying the examples. If they don't work, open an issue.
Contributions are always welcome.
Clean it up, janny!
Deleting a link can be done simply by running:
rm /srv/clink/*/BADLINKHERE
Replace /srv/clink
with whatever your data directory is.
No. While it might be possible through some NGINX stuff, this is not supported nor it is encouraged.
No, unless someone links to grabify or something. If access logs are turned on, then the server administrator can see your IP, but management of access logs is up to them.
Probably, I don't know. Won't have HTTPS though, so either way, I heavily recommend you use a reverse proxy.
The seed is used for generating deletion keys. Do not share it whatsoever.
I've only tested it on my Arch Linux server, but it should work perfectly fine on all Linux distributions. Probably doesn't work on Windows.
Yes. Simply put the proxy_pass
directive in a subdirectory, i.e.:
location /shortener {
proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
}
While the original link was by far the best link shortener I could find, it had a few problems:
- No query-string support: had to make POST requests
- Didn't decode URLs
- SQLite is not the greatest storage method out there
- No pre-provided systemd or NGINX files
- No install
target for the makefile
The first two are mostly problems when using them with specific services; i.e. PrivateBin, which expects to be able to use query-strings and encoded URLs.
So, seeing those problems, I decided to fork it. However, Go is absolute anal cancer (~300 line file results in a 8MB executable), so I decided to write it in C (and now, it's ~270 lines and results in a ~60KB executable). Also, I like C.
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