After all, the core functionality is very simple: Take a URL as input, and issue a redirect to another URL. And beyond the options already available, building a link shortener is a good first programming project to get to know a new language or web framework. You can find the source code for YOURLS on GitHub under an MIT license.ĭon't like any of these options? Take a look around the Internet and you can find several other choices: shuri, Nimbus, Lstu, and many others. It also has an API, making it easy to create other programs which interface with it. It supports custom URLs, comes with a bookmarklet to make sharing easy, has pretty robust built-in stats, and supports a pluggable architecture to allow others to add to it. You can configure it to be publicly usable by anyone, or only allow certain users to use it. Written in PHP, YOURLS is a pretty feature-rich option that works well out of the box. In full disclosure, I ran it for several years in production on a personal site, and was very happy with its capabilities. YOURLS, short for Your Own URL Shortener, is the option I am most familiar with. The source code for Polr can be found on GitHub under a GPLv2 license. Check out the online demo before you download. Of the three presented here, it's the lightest on features, but if you're looking for a simple but functional option it may be a good choice for you. Polr describes itself as a "modern, powerful, and robust URL shortener." It has a fairly straight-forward but modern interface, and like our other options detailed here comes with an API to allow you to use it from within other programs. Lessn More provides its source code on GitHub under a 3-clause BSD license. Some helpful features that set Lessn More apart are the ability to use a banned-words list to avoid creating an accidentally-inappropriate URL, the ability to avoid "lookalike" characters to make URLs more readable, the ability to choose whether or not to use mixed-case characters, and a few other helpful features. Lessn More provides most of the features you would expect from a URL shortener: API and bookmarklet support, custom URLs, etc. Lessn More is a personal URL shortener, built in PHP and forked off of an older project called Buttered URLs, which itself was derived from a fork of a project called Lessn. It's yours to own and operate as you please.įortunately, there are many open source options out there if you want to build the next bit.ly, goo.gl, or ow.ly yourself. You decide who has access to your analytics. With a self-hosted service, you decide how long your service operates for. While some services will let you pick your own domain to use, sometimes, that's about the level of customization you're going to get. But despite these challenges, URL shorteners aren't going anywhere anytime soon.īut with so many free link shortening services out there, why roll your own? In short: control. They make it challenging to figure out where a link is actually taking you before you click, and they're vulnerable to linkrot, should the service providing the short URL for you ever disappear. There are some challenges to URL shorteners, to be sure. They make it possible to provide a consistent entryway to a URL that may change frequently on the other side. They make it easier to perform analytics across a group of URLs. They can bring a consistent branding to a social media account. They can make it much easier to type, or remember, an otherwise lengthy bare URL. Today, people use link shorteners for a slew of reasons. And back in the days before Twitter added their own link shortener to their service, a long URL meant taking precious characters away from your tweets. But sometimes, between a deep directory structure on a site, plus a large number of parameters tacked on to the end, URLs just begin to get unwieldy.
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