didip / shawty

Smallest URL shortener in Go

Shawty: URL Shortener Service

This service encodes URL in base-36 and store them in filesystem.

It has 3 features: shorten, unshorten, and redirect.

Can I use it in production?

You need to implement a storage that can scale beyond one application server.

Why?

By itself, URL shortening is quite useful.

But this project exists to demonstrate:

• How concise Go is. cloc shows that this project contains only 125 lines.

• How slim Go is: 3MB RAM.

• How comprehensive Go standard library is.

• How easy it is to get up and running in Go. It took me about 1 hour from start to finish. Writing this README file took longer time.

• How performant Go is:

  # Command  : ab -n 100000 -c 200 -k http://localhost:8080/dec/1
  # Processor: 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo  <-- Crummy 6 years old laptop
  
  Concurrency Level:      200
  Time taken for tests:   8.610 seconds
  Complete requests:      100000
  Failed requests:        0
  Non-2xx responses:      100000
  Keep-Alive requests:    100000
  Total transferred:      22400000 bytes
  HTML transferred:       7600000 bytes
  Requests per second:    11614.80 [#/sec] (mean)
  Time per request:       17.219 [ms] (mean)
  Time per request:       0.086 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
  Transfer rate:          2540.74 [Kbytes/sec] received
  

My other Go libraries

• Tollbooth: Simple middleware to rate-limit HTTP requests.

• Gomet: Simple HTTP client & server long poll library for Go. Useful for receiving live updates without needing Websocket.

• Stopwatch: A small library to measure latency of things. Useful if you want to report latency data to Graphite.

• LaborUnion: A dynamic worker pool library.

shawty's Issues

Drop Gorilla mux

For simple pattern matching like this, you don't necessarily need a router like mux. You can give a tree prefix like /red/ (note the trailing slash) to DefaultServeMux (e.g. by calling http.HandleFunc). And if you really wanted to make this short, you could inline the handler functions — although that would trade off some readability.

So, this:

params := mux.Vars(r)
code := params["code"]

…could simply become:

code := r.URL.Path[len("/red/"):]

Plus, you have some inconsistency with that, at another place you write code := mux.Vars(r)["code"] on one line.