Shower Idea: Build a URL Shortener With Jekyll

I wanted to self-host a URL shortener for a long time in order to easily share blog posts, lecture material, files etc. Surprisingly, none of the solutions listed on Awesome-Selfhosted were really fitting me. They usually require a frontend, a database, and sometimes don’t run in ARM docker containers without a bit of hacking. Besides, I’m not interested in fancy features like analytics, access control, and co.

KISS1! I just need a set of HTML pages with a http-equiv="refresh" tag that points to my target!

I take a shower and realize I can repurpose Jekyll very much like I did to generate podcast RSS feeds, but this time with HTTP redirects. A couple of commits later, the first prototype is working. I feel refreshed, smell like a coconut, and the project is available on Github: du4.link.

Categories:  #development  #Open Source