Month: August 2025

Categories
Funemployed Software Development

Laravel Url Shortener FTW

Where I discuss creating a bitly style self-hosted URL shortener written for the Laravel framework.

While working through my funemployment (which wasn’t fun, but maybe I can convince myself) I started a side-project to (re-)learn Laravel. The last time I used Laravel was version 4 or 5 — it’s now v. 12 so there’s been a few changes.

My need to learn combined with my need to be more frugal lately (💸 no paychecks). I’ve been brainstorming methods limiting websites dependencies on databases (which typically incur an increased cost from additional hardware requirements). And given one of my websites lost it’s hosting and used to have YOURLS deployed on it I wanted an alternative I could play around with.

Sidenote: a URL shortener essentially allows a mapping from a site you own (e.g. n3f.co) to a much larger or longer URL. There really isn’t much use for it, but I enjoy the vanity aspect (controlling my own), making short urls as bookmarks, sharing links, and tracking clicks.

The actual implementation was pretty simple. Laravel made creating the routes really easy and I just had to create a couple react components and add them to the default project. I thought this might be a fun project to try with Rails and Go as well if I ever get the time (and I wouldn’t even have to do much to the frontend).

Route::controller(UrlController::class)->group(function () {
    Route::post('urls', 'store')->name('urls.store');
    Route::patch('urls/{id}', 'edit')->name('urls.edit');
    Route::get('urls/{id}/stats', 'stats')->name('urls.stats');
    Route::delete('urls/{id}', 'destroy')->name('urls.destroy');
})->middleware(['auth', 'verified', 'throttle:10,1']);
Code language: PHP (php)
Url Shortener edit form
Url Shortener edit form
set an expiration

Right now the feature set isn’t comprehensive, but you can currently:

  • Create a short url
  • Define the alias or short code. (Or just use an apparently randomly generated one)
  • Set an expiration for a defined url (i.e. after a certain timestamp the redirection to the target will stop working)
  • Edit or delete your defined urls
  • Currently, I’m preserving all requests, but I need additional analytics processing and UI to surface results.
  • Uses any database Laravel supports including SQLite (which is free–this results in roughly 50% savings for me 🤑)

Features I need to add (or would like to):

  • search
  • stats (other than simple clicks)
  • QR code sharing.
  • bookmarklets (are these even used any more?)

I’m curious if anyone else would find this project helpful. Would you use a link shortener? If so, what features would you like to see?

Categories
Funemployed Software Development

Deploying Laravel application to nearlyfreespeech.net

I recently created a Laravel application as a side-project to re-learn the framework. (I’ll post more about it later. It’s a URL Shortener). The documentation for getting this application was mostly correct. However, I discovered at least one issue because I wanted to save money and use a SQLite database instead of the more costly MySQL one.

Transfer files

Get your files over to the site by rsync-ing the directory to the protected area:

# Replace $ACCOUNT with your NFSN account username and 
# $HOST with your assigned server hostname.
$ rsync -avz --exclude='.git' \
  --exclude='node_modules' \
  --exclude='storage/logs/*' \
  --exclude='storage/framework/cache/*' \
  --exclude='storage/framework/sessions/*' \
  --exclude='storage/framework/views/*' \
  --exclude='.env' --exclude='vendor' \
  --exclude='.DS_Store' --exclude='*.log' \
  . $ACCOUNT@$HOST:/home/protected/laravel-app/Code language: Bash (bash)

Update .env

Depending on your application this could be complicated or easy. Copy your .env.example to .env and make any changes necessary.

Set file system permissions

I found 3 directories I needed to update, if you aren’t using the default sqlite database you can skip that one.

#!/bin/bash

directories=(
    "database"        # ⚠️ where the sqlite database goes
    "storage"         # logs/cache
    "bootstrap/cache" # cache (duh)
)

for directory in "${directories[@]}"; do
    chown -R web "$directory"
    chmod -R 775 "$directory"
doneCode language: PHP (php)

Get public directory configured

The public directory is locked down so it can’t be moved or overwritten. I moved everything in my Laravel app’s public directory into the nearlyfreespeech one, deleted the empty directory, and then linked to the canonical one. Effectively it lets the public directory be in 2 places at the same time.

From inside the laravel-app directory:

$ ln<span style="background-color: initial; font-size: inherit; text-align: initial; text-wrap-mode: wrap; color: inherit; letter-spacing: -0.015em;"> -s ../../public public</span>Code language: Bash (bash)

Rebuild application

You can forego this step if you transfer your vendor directory and run npm run build first too. From the Laravel app directory:

  1. composer install
  2. npm install
  3. npm run build
  4. php artisan optimize

.htaccess

Either move or copy the provided .htaccess file to public. Laravel requires its own .htaccess rules for routing (otherwise all requests won’t be directed through index.php).

Conclusion

That should be it. Test your application and get it running. I found a problem with a models generated attributes–💡I had to add the $appends property–but in general it seems to be working well.