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Building a URL shortening service with NodeJS and MongoDB. Deploy to Azure.

Olamide Aboyeji on April 15, 2020

Hey there, we would be building a URL shortening service with NodeJS, Express, and MongoDB. We would then go ahead and deploy our web application t...

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Anderson Pimentel • Apr 15 '20

Great article! Congrats!

Two minor fixes:

On package.json file, it's missing a comma at the end of the line:

"dev" : "nodemon server.js"

On server.js there's an extra s on body-pa*s*rser

Olamide Aboyeji • Apr 16 '20

Thanks for pointing that out. Fixed.

Thank you

Emin Deniz • Apr 16 '20

👏🏼 Good project

I can’t understand why you are storing “shorturl” and “ uniquename”, shorturl consist of baseurl and uniqueurl
It can be generated dynamically when execution of geturl, because baseurl is constant for all links, no need to store it.
Also, if we change the domain, it can be used still

Peter Mézeš • Apr 17 '20

Nice one, thank you!

Btw, that error handling:

catch (error) {
        ///catch any error, and return server error
        return res.status(500).json({ok : false, error : 'Server error'});
}

It is like programming version of: - What is wrong darling? - Nothing!

All good, just made me giggle a bit :)

sammychinedu2ky • Apr 15 '20

Nice one bro

Olamide Aboyeji • Apr 16 '20

Thanks

Pacharapol Withayasakpunt • Apr 15 '20

The problem happens to be having to buy a short domain, to get a short URL.

Emin Deniz • Apr 16 '20

Sometimes it is not necessary. At my student club, we are using rebrandly with subdomain of our website. example go.compec.org/xyz
It seems long, but easier than bit.ly or tinyurl. Domain part of short url includes “go” and our club short name.
We are happy with it.

Pacharapol Withayasakpunt • Apr 16 '20

Actually, xxx.now.sh seems shorter (with splat / regex), but I don't how short xxx can be.

Also, now.sh supports database via /api folder (or serverless / buildpacks). I should try to make a url shortener someday, perhaps...

Olamide Aboyeji • Apr 15 '20

Yes, you would have to set that up on the azure portal. Buy one and configure.

Osinachi Chukwujama • Apr 15 '20

The short url is long

😄

Nice article. Though we'd need to make your Frontend more appealing.

Olamide Aboyeji • Apr 15 '20

Thank you!
Yes, you would have to get a short domain name and map it to the azure app.

For the frontend 😅, did not want to spend time on UI, just straight to implementation.

Aminu M. Bulangu • Apr 15 '20

Awesome

Olamide Aboyeji • Apr 16 '20

Thank you

Javier Fernández • Apr 15 '20

Good Job!!

Olamide Aboyeji • Apr 16 '20

Thank you

Louis Nel • Apr 20 '20

Loved this tutorial. The hardest part seems to find a cool short URL. The use of the fetch library in the frontend seems leaner than using jQuery AJAX.