Go URL Shortener

Design a URL shortening service similar to TinyURL, with the following goals:

Functional Requirements:

1. Given a URL, generate a shorter alias for it.
2. When accessing a shorter alias, redirect to the original link.

Non-functional Requirements:

1. Availability: The system must be highly available for URL redirection.
2. Low Latency: The system should perform at low latency to provide a smooth user experience.

🎉 Demonstration

All services are managed on Docker using Docker-compose. The services include 1 web server, 2 API servers, 1 Zookeeper, 1 Redis, and 1 PostgreSQL.

For more details, refer to How to Run.

📁 Project Structure

• front: This directory contains the frontend code of the project. It has been developed using React/Typescript. It is containerized with Nginx to serve static content and assign requests to the backend services.

• back: This directory contains the backend code of the project. It has been developed using Go and other relevant tools. As the API service, the backend must operate alongside other services, such as Postgres, Zookeeper, and Redis.

• dockerconfig: This directory stores Dockerfiles and config files of other required services, such as Redis and Zookeeper. These files will be used when launching docker-compose.

🛠️ System Architecture 🚧

The system comprises different components:

• A web server is a React application with Nginx.
• API server replicas that handle REST/RPC requests/responses, a unique ID generator, and Base62.
• A Zookeeper provides distributed synchronization and supports the unique ID generation by maintaining sequence range for each API server replica.
• A database stores the mapping of long and short URLs. PostgreSQL was chosen to focus on the performance of the application layer, with storage performance considered a future enhancement.
• Furthermore, frequent read requests are cached by Redis to reduce latency and boost response times.

🚀 How to Run

1. Clone the repository to your local machine.
2. Ensure that the Docker is already installed and running.
3. Create a .env file with the required settings (make gen.env).
4. Run make app.start to wait for all containers to run.
5. Open the browser and go to http://localhost to see the frontend app.