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Build a URL shortener with Sails

Kelvin Omereshone

Inspired by a YouTube tutorial by Kyle from Web Dev Simplified on using Express and Mongo DB to build a URL shortener, I hacked together an equivalent URL shortener powered by Sails and Sails-disks. You can find the demo of the completed project here

I really had some fun building this project so I’d thought I’d share it with you. Before we dive right in, let’s look at the Why of building a URL shortener

The purpose of a URL shortener

So at the basic level, a URL shortener mostly helps you shorten long URLs for easy sharing on the internet. You might have used a URL shortening service like https://bit.ly.

How a URL shortener works

The fundamental way a URL shortener works, is that you give it a URL say https://sailscasts.com/courses and the service gives you back a shorter representative of the URL you passed in like https://ur.l/FHRKHGDI

Do note that the https://u.rl part of the URL given to you which is the TLD(Top Level Domain) is the URL of the address where the URL shortener can be found and the FHRKHGDI bit of the URL is the unique ID of the URL that has been shortened for you.

So when you give someone https://u.rl/FHRKHGDI, the URL shortening service i.e the URL shortener will check if it has a matching URL with the ID and if it does, it redirects to the long URL which in this case will be https://sailscasts.com/courses.

Let’s build it!

So now we’ve seen how a URL shortener should work at the basic level, let’s build one with Sails. To get started simply create a brand new Sails application by running the following in your terminal:

sails new sails-url-shortener

When the Sails CLI prompts you for the template for your new Sails app, choose Empty.s

Then open up the newly generated project in your Text Editor of choice.

The Frontend

To get started we need to flesh out the UI of our app, so head over to views/pages and rename homepage.ejs to index.ejs and also clear out the content inside and replace with the following HTML markup

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">

<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8">
  <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
  <link href="https://unpkg.com/tailwindcss@^2/dist/tailwind.min.css" rel="stylesheet">
  <title>Sails URL Short'nr</title>
</head>
<body>
  <main class="py-6 px-24 flex items-center flex-col">
    <h1 class="text-2xl text-gray-700">Short'n your URL mate!</h1>
    <form action="/shorturls" method="POST" class="my-4 flex space-x-2 w-1/2" autocomplete="off">
      <label for="url" class="sr-only">URL</label>
      <input type="url" name="url" id="url" placeholder="https://sailscasts.com" required
        class="border px-4 py-2 rounded-full flex-1 focus:outline-none">
      <button type="submit" class="text-white px-4 py-2 rounded-full bg-blue-400 hover:bg-blue-500">Short'n</button>
    </form>
    <table class="w-1/2">
      <thead class="text-left text-gray-600">
        <th>URL</th>
        <th>Short URL</th>
        <th>Clicks</th>
      </thead>
        <tr>
          <td>
          <a href="https://sailscasts.com/pricing" class="text-blue-400" target="_blank">
              https://sailscasts.com/pricing
            </a>
          </td>
          <td>
            <a href="GHERHJK>" class="text-blue-500" target="_blank">
                GHERHJK
              </a>
          </td>
          <td>
            1
          </td>
        </tr>
    </table>
  </main>
</body>
</html>

That’s basically all the HTML you will need for the UI of our URL shortener. Notice we are pulling in Tailwind CSS from a CDN to help with styling the UI. So what’s happening in our UI? Well we are just simply giving the user a form with an input to enter the long URL and then a button that will submit the form to create the Short URL. We also present a table which will contain the long URL, the shorten URL(which the user can then share) and also we are showing the number of times the shorten URL was used or clicked.

Now before you lift Sails to see your UI, we need to do a couple of things: First we need to tell Sails we won’t be needing a layout for this app since we have only just a single page. To do this, head over to config/views.js and set the layout property to false. Secondly we need to configure the /(root) route of our app to point to an action(one we will be creating shortly). So let’s do that, head over to config/routes.js and edit the / route to the below code:

  '/': 'home/index',

From the above, we are pointing the requests on / of our app to be handled by an action called index.js but this action doesn’t exists yet, let’s generate it. Run the below command in your terminal to generate the action:

sails generate action home/index

The above will create a home/ directory under api/controllers/ and inside it create the index.js action. Now edit the content of index.js to look like the below snippet:

module.exports = {
  friendlyName: 'Index',
  description: 'Index home.',
  exits: {
    success: {
      responseType: 'view',
      viewTemplatePath: 'pages/index'
    }
  },
  fn: async function () {
  }
};

And that’s it for the UI, you can now run sails lift on the terminal and see your UI.

Creating the Short URLs

Now that we have the UI all setup, the next step is to make the button to shorten the URLs functional. To do this, we will start off by creating a model called ShortUrl this model will be used by Waterline to create a shorturl table in our database. But before then, since we want this app to be compatible with MongoDB(assuming we will be deploying it to production), we need to set the primary ID column of all documents to be _id as MongoDB requires. To do this, head over to config/models.js and find the line referencing id and set it to the following instead:

 id: { type: 'string', columnName: '_id' },

Also in config/models.js set the migrate property to alter

After you are done with the above configurations, generate the ShortUrl model by running the following command:

sails generate model ShortUrl

Sails we generate a new waterline model file in api/models called ShortUrl.js open this file and edit it to look like so:

module.exports = {
  attributes: {
    url: {
      type: 'string',
      description: 'URL to shorten',
      isURL: true
    },
    short: {
      type: 'string',
    },
    clicks: {
      type: 'number',
      isInteger: true,
      defaultsTo: 0
    }
  },
  beforeCreate: async function (shorturl, cb) {
    const shortid = require('shortid');
    shorturl.short = shortid.generate();
    return cb();
  },
};

One notable thing about this model is that we are generating a shortid which will be a unique string to reference our short Urls inside the beforeCreate hook of Waterline. However we haven’t installed this dependency yet. So run the below command to install shortid:

npm i --save shortid

So with this model setup, anytime a new record is about being created using the ShortUrl model, the beforeCreate hook will run and assign a unique shortid to the short attribute of that record.

shorturls action

Notice in our UI, the form element is set to submit the form to /shorturls but that endpoint doesn’t exist yet, so let’s create the action, setup the route in config/routes.js and add the logic to create the shorturl. Head over to the terminal and run:

sails generate action shorturl/create-shorturl

Open config/routes.js and add the entry for this action:

  'POST /shorturls': 'shorturl/create-shorturl',

This means any POST request to /shorturls will be handled by shorturl/create-shorturl action.

Now that’s done let’s add the content for create-shorturl.js. Replace the content in that file to the one below:

module.exports = {
  friendlyName: 'Create shorturl',
  description: '',
  inputs: {
    url: {
      type: 'string',
      isURL: true,
      required: true
    }
  },
  exits: {
    success: {
      responseType: 'redirect'
    }
  },
  fn: async function ({ url }) {
    await ShortUrl.create({ url });
    return '/';

  }
};

Okay, so what’s going on in this action you might ask. Well we are telling the action to expect a parameter referenced by url to be submitted and then use it to create a new record using the ShortUrl model’s create method and after creating the record, redirect to the homepage i.e ’/‘.

If you Sails application has been running, kill it and restart it again. Then try entering a URL in the form and click the button to shorten it. You will notice that you will be redirected to the homepage again. Now to verify if the record was created, kill your server and start the Sails console by running:

sails console

Then type inside the REPL ShortUrl.find().log() this should output a single record which is the one you just created now!

Displaying the Short URLs in the table

So now that we can create Short URLs let’s display it in the table of our UI. To do this, we need to modify both home/index.js and views/pages/index.ejs. Let’s start with the action; what we need to do here is to use waterline to grab all the short URL and then pass it to the view. To do this, simply edit fn body in home/index.js to the below code snippet:

  fn: async function () {
    const shortUrls = await ShortUrl.find().sort('createdAt DESC');
    return { shortUrls };
  }

So we are fetching all the records and sorting them by the createdAt attribute, then we pass the records we get back to the view as a Sails local with the ES6 object property shorthand which evaluates to:

return { shortUrls: shortUrls }

Okay! now we need to head over to our view and consume the shortUrls array. To do this, we will use the .forEach method to loop through every element in the array and then render a row in our table. So modify the table code that holds the placeholder row to the following snippet right after the closing ` tag:

      <% shortUrls.forEach(shortUrl=> { %>
        <tr>
          <td><a href="<%= shortUrl.url %>" class="text-blue-400" target="_blank">
              <%= shortUrl.url %>
            </a></td>
          <td><a href="<%= shortUrl.short %>" class="text-blue-500" target="_blank">
              <%= shortUrl.short %>
            </a></td>
          <td>
            <% if (shortUrl.clicks) { %>
              <span class="text-green-400">
                <%= shortUrl.clicks %>
              </span>
              <% } else { %>
                <span class="text-gray-600">
                  <%= shortUrl.clicks %>
                </span>
                <% } %>
          </td>
        </tr>
        <% }) %>

Also notice we are conditionally rendering a Span just for visual cue to the user feedback on when a url has been clicked at least once from when it has not been clicked before.

So save your files and lift Sails and you should see the short URL you entered.

Making the short url redirect

Alright so we are almost done with our URL shortener but right now when you click the shortened link, you get a 404 because we haven’t written the logic for what happens when one of our short URLs are clicked. What we want is that when you click on the short URL you get redirected to the associated long URL and the click count is incremented by 1.

So let’s get started setting this up. First add a route entry below your other route entries in config/routes.js like so:

  'GET /:shortId': 'shorturl/get-shorturl'

Now create the shorturl/get-shorturl action by running the below command:

sails generate action shorturl/get-shorturl

Then add the following content to the get-shorturl.js file

module.exports = {
  friendlyName: 'Get shorturl',
  description: '',
  inputs: {
    shortId: {
      type: 'string',
      description: 'The short url identifier',
      required: true
    }
  },
  exits: {
    success: {
      responseType: 'redirect'
    },
    notFound: {
      responseType: 'notFound'
    }
  },
  fn: async function ({ shortId }) {
    const shortUrl = await ShortUrl.findOne({ short: shortId });
    if (!shortUrl) {throw 'notFound';}
    const newClicks = shortUrl.clicks + 1;
    await ShortUrl.updateOne({ id: shortUrl.id}).set({
      clicks: newClicks
    });
    return shortUrl.url;
  }
};

So basically in the above action, when a user makes a GET request using one of our short URLs, we look up if that Short URL exists in our DB, if it doesn’t exists, we bail by exiting with a notFound exit. However if it exists, we fetch it then increment its clicks by 1 and then redirect to the long URL helpd by the url attribute.

Now save all your files and then lift sails and you should have a basic functioning URL shortener all powered by Sails and the Sails-disks in-memory database.

Conclusion

In this article we took a step by step approach and built a basic URL shortener with Sails, you can extend this basic URL shortening service any way you like as you can fork the code on GitHub. Here are some ideas:

  • Implement a way for a user to only see the URLs he/she added
  • Make the short URL to be easily copied and shared on the internet
  • Host your customization of the project on your domain and use it as your URL shortener!

I’d be looking forward to see any customization you will be make atop this basic URL shortener powered by Sails. You can tweet at me your awesome work and questions.