Jaust stands for Just Another Url Shortener Tool and the name was inspired by the arcade game Joust (1982). The project contains a simple web server with a configurable backend (in-memory, Redis) to keep the url shortening persistent (or not).
Jaust consists of two separate parts:
- An endpoint which can be used with a shortened id to get redirected.
- An admin console where new shortened ids can be added.
This translates to the following endpoints:
/<id>which gives a redirect to a given url (if it exists)/consoleto shorten a url and get a hashed value
The application can be run in two modes: with or without the admin console. This path is chosen out of security reasons. Enabling or disabling the admin console is done with an environment value:
CONSOLE_ENABLED=true/false
The application can be run directly with cargo by using cargo run. However keep in mind
that a DATABASE_URL environment variable needs to be supplied. This can be done by adding an entry
to your .env file or by supplying it to the cargo command like this:
DATABASE_URL=postgres://postgres:password@localhost/jaust cargo run
The first time you deploy this application locally you need to set up the database first. This can be done with the following commands.
Run a local PostgreSQL database:
docker run --name postgres -p 5432:5432 -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password -e POSTGRES_DB=jaust -d postgres
Install the diesel cli (the ORM that is used):
cargo install diesel_cli --no-default-features --features postgres
Run the database migrations:
DATABASE_URL=postgres://postgres:password@localhost/jaust
diesel setup
diesel migration run
You can either run the application via docker-compose up or build your own Docker image. The repository
already contains a Dockerfile. Noteworthy: the image is built using musl (https://musl.libc.org/) in order
to produce a very small docker image.
- Add MySQL support next to PostgreSQL support
- Allow configurable back-end (via configuration)