NekoShlink

A free open-source URL Shortener written in Kotlin with Spring Boot

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Project maintained by nekoshlink Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham

Welcome to NekoShlink

NekoShlink is a URL Shortener - it belongs to the same category as Bitly and TinyURL, but unlike them, it is completely open source and free.

It offers the following features, aside from the obvious ability to make long complex URLs shorter 😏

• A Core API with CLI and REST front-ends
• Full access control of who can do what on your instance
• Several authentication methods supported
• Auto-generated and custom slugs
• Password protection of link expansion
• Support for multiple domains in the same instance
• Tagging for easier classification and searching
• Email tracking with 1px transparent image
• QR Code generation
• Visit stats

You have full access to the source code from NekoShlink’s Github repositories and you’re encouraged to fork and contribute!

Getting Started

Follow this link if you want to get up and running as quickly as possible.

If you have time to spare, read on for some background info on this project…

The Beginnings

NekoShlink was inspired by Shlink. Shlink is a URL Shortener written in PHP. I was using it for my own short URLs, the ones I create and hand out for my training events, but over time I realised I wanted more out of the software - there were features other shorteners had that were not going to be implemented in Shlink, so… I decided to rewrite it myself using Spring Boot.

I also noticed that there was no open-source URL Shortener product targeting any of the JVM languages, which meant my rewrite could also help feel a gap. I chose Kotlin because it works well with Spring Boot, it is less verbose than Java and as close as Scala (probably my favourite language) as is possible to get while comfortably writing Spring Boot code.

PluralSight Course

In June 2022 I was given the opportunity to write another course for Pluralsight (my fourth one) and the topic was Securing REST Services Using Spring Security 5 - it seemed almost like fate, as I had just completed the core development on NekoShlink, and I was about to embark on the task of securing the product using Spring Security.

Therefore, NekoShlink is the main subject of a Pluralsight course, too!

NekoShlink High-level Architecture

The main code base of NekoShlink is made up of three Spring Boot Gradle projects

• The shlink-core library project
• The shlink-cli console-based application project
• The shlink-rest web-based application project

This main code base offers a fully functional, albeit unsecured product. Full authentication and authorisation support, with various options, is provided by separate projects

• The shlink-security library project
• The shlink-userbase library project
• The optional shlink-oauth-server web-based project provides an OAuth2 auth server based on the Spring Security Auth Server code base

Finally, another project contains miscellaneous utility classes that are more general and do not apply specifically to NekoShlink

• The nekosoft-utils library project