chr 2.1.1

Python based URL shortening service

chr (coded under the name chru) is a Python based URL shortening service which uses Flask as a front end, and pysqlw as the SQL backend, to interface with sqlite3.

It can shrink billions of unique URLs with less than 6 characters, run in the background with no human interaction, and it can fly like a bird – or is that Super Man?

Features

• Can shorten several billion (yes!) unique urls to a less than 6 character slug.

• Verifies the shrunk URLs are legitimate, to stop abuse.

• Uses reCAPTCHA to stop spammers from using the service for evil, not good.

• Slugs are the base62 representation of their ID, so they’ll work in all browsers.

• A live chr instance is located at chr.so.

Dependencies

• Python 27 (>=2.7 required because of use of argparse module)

• requests (python-requests)

• Flask (flask)

• Flask KVSession (flask-kvsession)

• recaptcha client (recaptcha-client)

• mattdaemon (mattdaemon>=1.1.0)

• pysqlw (pysqlw>=1.3.0)

To install all of these: pip -r requirements.txt install (if installing from source)

Notes

• It’s highly recommended by the chr developers that if you’re putting this in a production environment (read: any computer with a public IP) that you look at the various Flask deployment options, such as putting it behind nginx, lighttpd, or something.

• It’s also recommended that you get your server (nginx, lighttpd, or hell, even Apache) serve out the static folder, rather than letting Flask do it.

• This will take a while to get fully featured, but we have a lot planned.

• jqPlot comes bundled with chr, which is alright as it’s MIT licensed.

Running

Visit the docs page, and click Usage for information on how to run chr.

Author

• plausibility

Contributors

• huey

• Chris Leonello (made jqPlot)