shorta.link

Custom link shortener service using Cloudflare Workers + KV store on your domain. The Workers free tier is quite generous and perfectly suited for this since KV is optimized for high reads and infrequent writes, which is our use case.

This project is privacy friendly, nothing but the URL and necessary data for rate limit are collected, and after a time discarded (except for the URL if it is fair usage).

This API is easily consumed programmatically, such as through shell functions, making it trivial to shorten links on the fly. It is console / cURL friendly:

Will show a text frontend when accessed via a text client such as cURL.

Additionally, it is possible to create short links right from a webpage if that is more to your liking: https://go.shorta.link.

Usage

Creating short links

Send a POST request with form data url and (optional) slug to redirect shorta.link to url.

For authentication, pass an API key in a X-Api-Key header.

If slug exists already, the value will NEVER be overwritten.

API Example

With authentication:

curl --location --request POST "https://shorta.link" \
    -H "X-Api-Key: your api key goes here" \
    -H "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded" \
    --data-urlencode "url=$URL" \
    --data-urlencode "slug=$NAME"

Without authentication:

curl --location --request POST "https://shorta.link" \
    -H "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded" \
    --data-urlencode "url=$URL" \
    --data-urlencode "slug=$NAME"

No slug (autogenerated short URL):

curl --location --request POST "https://shorta.link" \
    -H "X-Api-Key: your api key goes here" \
    -H "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded" \
    --data-urlencode "url=$URL"

passing https://github.com/piraces to url, and gh to slug will make https://shorta.link/gh redirect to it (this is a real example).

Deleting short links

Send DELETE request to the shortlink which should be deleted.

Authentication is required; pass the API key in the X-Api-Key header.

This method is idempotent, being that successive attempts to delete an already-deleted shortlink will result in status 200 (OK).

API Example

curl --location --request DELETE "https://shorta.link/gh" \
    -H "X-Api-Key: ${SECRET_API_KEY}"

Will delete the shortlink available at https://shorta.link/gh

Listing short links

Sending an authenticated GET request to the shorta.link domain root will respond with a list of all shortlinks maintained by the service.

Authentication is required; pass the API key in the X-Api-Key header.

API Example

curl --location --request GET "https://shorta.link" \
    -H "X-Api-Key: ${SECRET_API_KEY}"

Will return a JSON array of keys with one to three properties:

  [{ name: "gh", expiration: null, metadata: "https://github.com/piraces"}, ...]

(From https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/runtime-apis/kv#more-detail)

expiration and metadata are optional.

Consuming

This is the easy part, simply open the shortened link in your browser of choice!

Deploying

Automatically deploys to Cloudflare Workers on push using GitHub Actions. You will only need to modify the account and kv namespace values in wrangler.toml, and set the repo secrets CF_API_TOKEN and SECRET_API_KEY (this is the preshared header authentication key) used in the workflow.

Oh, and run the worker on the route you want your shortener service to be on of course.

License

Licensed under MIT license.

Acknowledgments

Based on the awesome work by Aadi Bajpai hello@aadibajpai.com in VandyHacks/vhl.ink.