PotatoLink

This project is a simple implementation of a link shortening service.

Features

• link shortening
• login/registration (create links with different expiration time depending on whether user is logged in or not)
• displaying a list of previously created links and their expiration time

Requirements

application has been tested with the following versions of environments

• Elixir >= 1.13
• NodeJS >= 16.13.2
• PostgreSQL >= 12.12

Installation

First clone the repository.

Database setup

Execute commands contained in create_db_structure.sql file in order to setup a database for this project

Frontend setup

Enter the "frontend" directory

Install all the required dependencies

npm install --dev

Build the frontend files

npm run build

The frontend is now ready to be served by the backend portion of the application

Backend setup

Enter the repo root directory

Install all the required dependencies

mix deps.get

Enter your database address and credentials in the init() function of lib/db_manager.ex file Enter information related to cookie encryption into the lib/router.ex file (replace values "KEY", "SIGNING_SALT", "SECRET_KEY_BASE" in the call to Plug.session)

build the project

mix build

That's it! Backend is ready to go

you can now run it from the _build directory

/your/path/to/the/project/directory/_build/dev/rel/potatolink/bin/potatolink start

Example screenshot

Known issues

The application has many avenues where it could be more efficient, more secure (I really shouldn't be hardcoding secrets, no you won't find them in this repo ;) or structured differently (link access id generation for example, or the majority of frontend) but it's fullfiling it's purpose, so I might improve it in the future

If you are going to run it on your server I advise you to put it behind a reverse proxy with rate limiting capabilities, since rate limiting hasn't been built in to the application

Disclaimer

This project is not meant to run in a production environment