What is an URL Shortener ?

An URL Shortener is a service which provides you a small URL which redirects users to the URL to be shortened. Time for examples! Consider the following test URL:

The intended behavior is to redirect the user to a chosen URL upon clicking. For the purpose of our example, the “_b8NwYzA” _string that is following the domain is an identifier for the back-end server which maps the short URL to an URL that was previously chosen. Upon accessing, the users will be redirected to the actual URL (using HTTP codes such as 301 “Moved Permanently” or 302 “Found”), for which the shortened variant was chosen.

For the sake of the article, we are going to focus more on the back-end, technologies and services, leaving the front-end for future revisions.

#web-development #python #flask #mongodb #docker