Cutshort

Please note: This readme is currently incomplete. It might be worked around Aug 2021 or later. Till then I hope what's written is suffice.

Cutshort is URL Shortner built with Django, MySQL, and Sass.

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System Design

It's live at cutshort.in

Some notes/brainstorming for myself

How we'll build this out

So we'll be dividing this into 2 parts

• The shortner
• The redirector

The shorter will basically do all the create/write stuff to the db table. It'll be hosted/operate on create.cutshort.in And the redirector will do all the redirecting and hence will mostly just do read operations on the db table. It'll be hosted on cutshort.in/<shortlink if any>

Environment Variables

Current have 3 environment variables:

- secret_key // django secret key
- DEBUG_COLLECTSTATIC=1 // for static files stuff in production. TBH Kinda forgot what this does exactly
- DATABASE_URL // db url for dj-database-url

Since I didn't like typing export env_variable=value thrice, I just put three export commands in a bash script (i.e. .sh file). Example file:

#! /bin/bash
export secret_key=<value goes here>
export DEBUG_COLLECTSTATIC=1
export DATABASE_URL=<value goes here>

To use this I need to type in source <file name>.sh and we're good to go!

Backend basic logic

• Shortner

  Make a RESTish API to check whether the shortlink exists Form which will POST to /create. If no shortlink tho create random, write to db and send back. If shortlnk -- Will check internally using REST API ke function to confirm ki it exists. --- If it does exist tho error page/404 with a message. --- If it doesn't exist, tho create and redirect to Success page.

• Redirector

  Read the shortlink from cutshort.in/<shortlink> and then see if it exists in table. If it does exist, then redirect to corresponding hyperlink. If it doesn't exist then retun 404 page.

Schema stuff

Where to pick off from

• In views.py need to use back https://github.com/jd/tenacity or https://github.com/litl/backoff to ensure retrys on queries.

• get_stats v/s getStats will need to be fixed in both views.py and urls.py

• Querying DB everytime for rendering homepage probably not good. Maybe use Cronjobs or time to update a variable/value regularly and just use that. Maybe use env_variables. Look into good use cases of env variables.

• I've made changes with tenacity.

• Querying the database to load the homepage seems a bit much. I'll need to figure something out. Might use orjson (https://github.com/ijl/orjson#install) and read from a json file. And write to it using a library called schedule (https://github.com/dbader/schedule)