bartnic2 / tinyapp

TinyApp Project (ver 1.0.0)

TinyApp is a full stack web application built with Node and Express that allows users to shorten long URLs (à la bit.ly).

Final Product

A Sample tinyURL Table

tinyURL Editing in Action

Dependencies

• Node.js
• Express
• EJS
• bcrypt
• body-parser
• cookie-session

Getting Started

• Install all dependencies (using the npm install command).

• Run the development web server using the node express_server.js command.

• Taking || to be your protocol, local domain, and port number (i.e. || = http://localhost:8080), navigate to ||/urls.

• New users should register to make an account; an encrypted cookie will maintain access to user settings throughout the session.

• Once registered, users will automatically be logged in to the system. From there, a link allows users to create a new tinyURL.

• Once the long-form URL is entered and submitted, users are redirected to an edit and information screen detailing various statistics on their new URL.

• Upon returning to ||/urls (by clicking the "Back to URL List" or "Update" if any changes are desired) a table will show a list of all URLs generated.

• Data is stored across multiple sessions, and users may edit or delete any tinyURL that belongs to them.

• To use tinyURL to navigate to the long-form URL, simply enter the tinyURL code into ||/u/:tinyURL, as demonstrated below with code "pi3kpr":

||/u/pi3kpr

Useful Features

• The ability to register and login to one's account, maintaining a user-specific list of generated tinyURLs
• The ability to add, delete, or edit URLs, while denying non-registered or other users from modifying your own personal list
• Dates and times for when your URLs were created and accessed by others (the latter shown on the edit and information page). Note that access information generates random IDs for non-registered users, but maintains the same (random) IDs for registered users.
• Can visit the URLs of another user, even if unregistered (these visits update usage statistics and can be seen by that user when he/she logs in)
• Encrypted cookies and hashed passwords used for extra security

tinyURL Idiosyncrasies:

• Note that the protocol (http://) must be included for each long-form URL added. This will hopefully be fixed on a future release.
• Also, please erase all cookies before using the application! (In Chrome, open the developer tools by pressing Ctrl+Shift+I, then navigate to Application, and clear the "cookies" section under Storage).