smolu 0.2.0

File based url shortening

smolu

Self-hosted url shortening for individual use.

The is a very simple file-based redirection generator producing unique short urls.

It has to be used with an existing http static file server.

Installation

git clone https://git.sr.ht/~lattay/smolu
cd smolu
pip install .

Optionally you want to install qrencode to be able to generate QR codes.

Usage

1. Configure the http server to serve the /srv/http/u/ directory statically, serving everything as html unconditionally.

Caddy config:

example.com:443 {
	root * /srv/http
	@html {
		path /u/*
		not path *.png
	}
	header @html Content-Type "text/html; charset=utf-8"
	file_server
}

Nginx config:

server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    server_name example.com;

    root /srv/http;

    ssl_certificate /path/to/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /path/to/privkey.pem;

    location ~ ^/u/.*\.png$ {
        # nothing special
    }

    location /u/ {
        add_header Content-Type "text/html; charset=utf-8";
    }
}

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name example.com;
    return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
}

2. Run smolu.py -C to initialize the configuration

3. To add a new short address, run smolu.py <target>, it will print the short url to stdout. If enabled, the QR code will be found at <short_url>.png

Note: this is designed for individual user, meaning it is not designed for millions of urls, or for super fast generation. It will check for collisions though (in a parallel unsafe way though, again a single user won't have a problem). The default is to use 6 bytes of timestamp and 6 random bytes, however even 2+1 should be just fine for personal use. The bytes are base64 encoded so for each 3 bytes of the id, you get 4 characters in the url.

Also, you need a short domain name, otherwise it really does not make sense.

Features

• Opt-in QR code generation
• Configurable short url length
• No SEO
• No analytics
• No tracking
• No ads
• No time limit
• Free and open source
• Self-hosted
• No database
• No longrunning process (apart from whatever http server you are running)
• No attack surface (assuming you are using a production grade http server such as nginx or caddy with TLS enabled)