Shortify

URL Shortener

The complete assignment description is available at the docs/ASSIGNMENT.md file.

Some information about stack choice is available at the docs/COMMENTS.md file.

Setup

Assuming that you already had Mongo and Ruby/Bundler installed, you can just run: bundle install

Running

After complete the setup, you can run: bin/rails server

If you use foreman, there is two options available:

• foreman start -f Procfile - Runs the default web server
• foreman start -f Procfile.dev - Runs the webserver and also a local mongodb server

Hopefully by now the project is running

Tests

To run the tests, make sure mongo is up, then: bundle exec rspec

---

Usage

API

Shortify has a built in REST like API, where you can manage your Shortened URLs. More information at the docs/API.md file.

Gateway

The API provides a shortened url, based on the host of the environment. The host can be set in the settings file of each environment.

Basically every shortened url will look like: http://shfy.ca/a32b7 -> http://{HOST}/{SLUG}

Redirecting

Currently the request status for the redirection is hardcoded to 301, mostly because it seems the right thing to do, once you have the DNS caching. That should be revisited if you want to have statistics of access.

---

Benchmarks

The benchmarks were perfomed with ApacheBench, running along with the webserver on my own local machine, the resuts were satisfatory, considering the stack and the conditions.

Test params:

• Goal: 10k requests
• Conditions: 100 concurrent requests
• Url: http://localhost:5000/example_slug
• Command line example: ab -c 100 -n 10000 -g results.data http://localhost:5000/example

Results

results ploted with gnuplot

Roadmap

Some nice things I would like to implement in the future.

• API dynamic documentation (Swagger)
• API Authentication
• Custom Cache-control (Related to stats vs crawlers)
• Improve api-database reliability
• Improve benchmarks
• Pretty error pages
• Grape/Mongo validators (Url/Slug)
• Search/get by slug
• Expiration Date
• Statistics (Access, origins, user-agent...)
• Automated deploy
• Logging (GrapeLogger/Middleware logger)
• Monitoring (NewRelic)