kaon

Kaon

Kaon is a simple URL shortening service written in Go that uses Redis for backend storage.

Configuration

An example configuration file (with explanations of config values)is provided in config.yaml. You may also instead set any config value via environment variables. e.g.,

KAON_DEBUG=1
KAON_REDIS_HOST=localhost
KAON_REDIS_PORT=6379
KAON_SHOW_INFO=0

Usage

To shorten a URL, simply POST a form with a url property to the service. You'll receive a JSON object in return, with some details about the stored link.

$ curl -XPOST -d 'url=http://example.com' http://localhost:9111/

{"key":"1","original":"http://example.com","clicks":0,"creationTime":1586654007}

The key property on the returned object defines the new short URL. You may then nagivate to http://localhost:9111/1 and be redirected to http://example.com.

$ curl -v http://localhost:9111/1

* Hostname was NOT found in DNS cache
*   Trying ::1...
* connect to ::1 port 9111 failed: Connection refused
*   Trying 127.0.0.1...
* Connected to localhost (127.0.0.1) port 9111 (#0)
> GET /1 HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: curl/7.37.1
> Host: localhost:9111
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
< Location: http://example.com
< Date: Mon, 02 Mar 2015 17:05:04 GMT
< Content-Length: 53
< Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
<
<a href="http://example.com">Moved Permanently</a>.

To view information about the stored object (such as the click count or original URL), ensure the show_info config value is enabled and then simply send a TRACE request, instead of a GET.

$ curl -XTRACE http://localhost:9111/1

{"key":"1","original":"http://example.com","clicks":3,"creationTime":1586654007}

Development

Just use docker-compose up and you'll find kaon running on localhost:9111.