This is a simple URL shortener written using Spring Boot - demo available here.
Key features:
- Authentication
- Redirects short to full URLs
- Create, edit and delete your own short URLs
- Randomly generated or customisable short URLs
- Tracks the number of clicks on each URL
| Purpose | Technology |
|---|---|
| Language | Java |
| Front end | Thymeleaf, Bootstrap, Alpine |
| Back end | Spring Boot, Hibernate, PostgreSQL |
| Linting/Static code checks | PMD, Google Java Style Guide Formatter |
| Testing | JUnit, Mockito |
| CI/CD | Github Actions, Heroku |
# clone the repositories to your local machine with either
git clone [email protected]:PhilipVigus/url-shortener.gitThe following assumes you have Maven set and can run it from the command-line
# start the application, which will be accessible on http://localhost:8080/
mvn spring-boot:runmvn testAs commented in the introduction, this project is deliberately bare-bones, and was intended as a way for me to learn to use the stack it is built with following best practice as much as I could. The design is deliberately simple, with the minimum functionality required to allow me to do this.
Simple authentication and authorisation are implemented, with values stored in the PostgreSQL database, but a lot of the functionality you would generally expect to be there, such as changing passwords was deliberately left out.
The algorithm used to generate the unique short URLs is also deliberately simple. I am aware of some of its shortcomings, but felt that a more complex approach was not the point of the project.
By far the greatest challenge I faced during the project was learning how to write integration and to a lesser extent, unit tests. For example, it took a while to work out how to set up controller tests to properly work with authentication and authorisation.
Coming from a PHP/Laravel background, much of the detail of that is abstracted away to an extent I didn't realise, and it was interesting and instructive to go through the process of setting integration tests up.
The test code went through a number of iterations and simplifications to get to the point it's now at, but I'm certain that more can be done. For example, I am making a lot of use of the @SpringBootTest annotation, which adds significant startup/teardown times. I've since read in a few places of approaches that might be applicable that would reduce how often that annotation is used.
- Allow unit and integration tests to be run separately
- Flesh out authentication
- Remember me
- Change password
- Add email address so features like password resets can be implemented
- Add more detail to click statistics
- Clicks over time graph
- Clicks in last 24 hours
- Improve algorithm that calculates the short URL
- Allow csv uploads to bulk-generate URLs
- Optimise tests