Url shortening supported by Opalstack?

loupgarou

Hello, i wanted to start self-hosting a url shortening service, after having using rebrandly for a long time: the issue is that the free tier is very limited and the paid tier is too expensive for my needs, so i was going to try a self-hosted service.

I know that maybe a shared hosting is not the best environment, but i should at least do some experiments and break my bones... right?

At the moment i've tried the installation of this script:

The installation from cli has been successful, the "{myaccountname}.opalstacked.com/public" answer with a customized 404 error page . Apparently everything seems to be ok.

The problem manifests when i try to use the remote panel to create new shortened urls: . I've generated an api-key as suggested in the documentation, but the remote web client (made with React) cannot connect at all.

If you have alternatives, please suggest them

I'm not forced to use shlink (even if it seems very well elegant), so if you have some other alternatives tested on opalstack, please list them!

what i need:

a simple interface to create and customize the links
a reporting view with the relative statistics (unique users, OS, Devices, Country/region/city of origin)

Thanks!

sean

loupgarou You mentioned "public".

If your app serves it's content from a subdirectory like that then you probably want to use a symlink app to serve that directory, as opposed to serving the entire app from its root.

We have an example of how to do that here: https://help.opalstack.com/article/135/example-serving-a-laravel-project-with-a-symlink-app

That example is for Laravel but the concept is identical.

Note that you are responsible for the redirects served by your URL shortener. This means that if you're running a public shortener and it's being abused by scammers to redirect to phishing sites etc then you'll need to kill those redirects and take the site offline until you can find a way to prevent the abuse. If you're setting this up from scratch then I very strongly recommend that you implement a CAPTCHA or whatever now before this becomes a problem.

loupgarou

sean ohhh! so that's the usage of the symbolic link!
I have to test it!

Regarding abuse: it would only be used for my own projects and i would do my best to close any possible bug to prevent abuse! But thanks for the warning!

loupgarou

sean Update!

It works! I've generated the symbolic link as you said and i've reinstalled the script under a new shell user.
The missing part was the https protocol:

The web client, written in react, MUST run over the https protocol (because Chrome requires it!)
the opalstacked.com domain could not activate the https, so the app could not work over http.
So i registered a new domain, moved it to opalstack, requested the let's encrypt certificate and routed all the traffic over SSL
Boom, it worked!

It's also pretty safe (i think), because the react web client is basically a static web interface: the connection is made using my local browser, no credentials are saved remotely: in order to make some changes an abuser need to get a copy of the api key generated by the cli interface.