Shlink Docker image

Shlink is a self-hosted URL shortener which includes both a REST and a CLI interface in order to interact with it.

This image provides an easy way to set up shlink on a container-based runtime.

It exposes a shlink instance served with swoole, which persists data in a local sqlite database.

Usage

Shlink docker image exposes port 8080 in order to interact with its HTTP interface.

It also expects these two env vars to be provided, in order to properly generate short URLs at runtime.

• SHORT_DOMAIN_HOST: The custom short domain used for this shlink instance. For example doma.in.
• SHORT_DOMAIN_SCHEMA: Either http or https.

So based on this, to run shlink on a local docker service, you should run a command like this:

docker run --name shlink -p 8080:8080 -e SHORT_DOMAIN_HOST=doma.in -e SHORT_DOMAIN_SCHEMA=https shlinkio/shlink

Interact with shlink's CLI on a running container.

Once the shlink container is running, you can interact with the CLI tool by running shlink with any of the supported commands.

For example, if the container is called shlink_container, you can generate a new API key with:

docker exec -it shlink_container shlink api-key:generate

Or you can list all tags with:

docker exec -it shlink_container shlink tag:list

Or process remaining visits with:

docker exec -it shlink_container shlink visit:process

All shlink commands will work the same way.

You can also list all available commands just by running this:

docker exec -it shlink_container shlink

Use an external DB

The image comes with a working sqlite database, but in production you will probably want to usa a distributed database.

It is possible to use a set of env vars to make this shlink instance interact with an external MySQL database (PostgreSQL support will be included soon).

• DB_DRIVER: [Mandatory]. Use the value mysql to prevent the sqlite database to be used.
• DB_NAME: [Optional]. The database name to be used. Defaults to shlink.
• DB_USER: [Mandatory]. The username credential for the MySQL server.
• DB_PASSWORD: [Mandatory]. The password credential for the MySQL server.
• DB_HOST: [Mandatory]. The host name of the server running the MySQL engine.
• DB_PORT: [Optional]. The port in which the MySQL service is running. Defaults to 3306.

Taking this into account, you could run set up shlink on a local docker service like this:

docker run --name shlink -p 8080:8080 -e SHORT_DOMAIN_HOST=doma.in -e SHORT_DOMAIN_SCHEMA=https -e DB_DRIVER=mysql -e DB_USER=root -e DB_PASSWORD=123abc -e DB_HOST=something.rds.amazonaws.com shlinkio/shlink

You could even link to a local database running on a different container:

docker run --name shlink -p 8080:8080 [...] -e DB_HOST=some_mysql_container --link some_mysql_container shlinkio/shlink

Supported env vars

A few env vars have been already used in previous examples, but this image supports others that can be used to customize its behavior.

This is the complete list of supported env vars:

• SHORT_DOMAIN_HOST: The custom short domain used for this shlink instance. For example doma.in.
• SHORT_DOMAIN_SCHEMA: Either http or https.
• DB_DRIVER: Either sqlite or mysql.
• DB_NAME: The database name to be used when the driver is mysql. Defaults to shlink.
• DB_USER: The username credential to be used when the driver is mysql.
• DB_PASSWORD: The password credential to be used when the driver is mysql.
• DB_HOST: The host name of the database server when the driver is mysql.
• DB_PORT: The port in which the database service is running when the driver is mysql. Defaults to 3306.
• DISABLE_TRACK_PARAM: The name of a query param that can be used to visit short URLs avoiding the visit to be tracked. This feature won't be available if not value is provided.
• DELETE_SHORT_URL_THRESHOLD: The amount of visits on short URLs which will not allow them to be deleted. Defaults to 15.
• LOCALE: Defines the default language for error pages when a user accesses a short URL which does not exist. Supported values are es and en. Defaults to en.
• VALIDATE_URLS: Boolean which tells if shlink should validate a status 20x (after following redirects) is returned when trying to shorten a URL. Defaults to true.
• NOT_FOUND_REDIRECT_TO: If a URL is provided here, when a user tries to access an invalid short URL, he/she will be redirected to this value. If this env var is not provided, the user will see a generic 404 - not found page.

An example using all env vars could look like this:

docker run \
    --name shlink \
    -p 8080:8080 \
    -e SHORT_DOMAIN_HOST=doma.in \
    -e SHORT_DOMAIN_SCHEMA=https \
    -e DB_DRIVER=mysql \
    -e DB_USER=root \
    -e DB_PASSWORD=123abc \
    -e DB_HOST=something.rds.amazonaws.com \
    -e "DISABLE_TRACK_PARAM=no-track" \
    -e DELETE_SHORT_URL_THRESHOLD=30 \
    -e LOCALE=es \
    -e VALIDATE_URLS=false \
    -e "NOT_FOUND_REDIRECT_TO=https://www.google.com" \
    shlinkio/shlink

Versions

Currently, the versions of this image match the shlink version it contains.

For example, installing shlinkio/shlink:v1.15.0, you will get an image containing shlink v1.15.0.

There are no official shlink images previous to v1.15.0.