10:56 a.m.
I spent some time this week evaluating 3 different URL shorteners for
use with AutoQA.
- url-shortener (https://github.com/voidfiles/url-shortener)
- TightURL (http://tighturl.com/project/p/tighturl/)
- yourls (http://yourls.org/)
TL;DR version - I think that yourls would be the best choice for us. It
has an API that looks good, it is actively maintained and has features
that the others don't.
Right now, I only have these set up on a local dev machine. If there is
interest, I can try to get something that would be a little more
publicly visible.
Tim
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url-shortener (https://github.com/voidfiles/url-shortener)
- Django based application
- more recently updated fork of the original url-shortener
* https://github.com/nileshk/url-shortener
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I didn't finish trying this one out mostly because of its dependencies.
It requires blueprint-css (a ruby based CSS framework) [1] to be
installed within its own directories. This would make packaging pretty
messy unless we did some code modifications to url-shortener to use a
common blueprint-css.
In addition to the dependency issue, there doesn't seem to be a whole
lot of documentation for the project and once I did get it running in
devel mode, its user interface was not incredibly intuitive.
Overall, it is written mostly in python but it seems to be rather dead
and I think that there are better options.
[1] https://github.com/joshuaclayton/blueprint-css/
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TightURL (http://tighturl.com/project/p/tighturl/)
- Written in PHP
- Deployed into production at http://tighturl.com/
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TightURL is a simple URL shortener written in PHP. It has been around
for a while, has a stable code base and has decent abuse protection.
The stable version hasn't been updated for a while but the developer is
keeping a devblog [2] that makes it look like the project is still
maintained.
The documentation is decent and there were no real surprises setting it
up. It has good support for templating and I don't think it would be
very hard to make it look more like part of Fedora or FedoraQA.
Unfortunately, there is no real API for shortening the URLS. It would
be possible to interface with the main page by scraping the content and
using the form, but that seems like a less-than-elegant way to do it
(not to mention being fragile and a pain).
[2] http://tighturl.com/project/devblog/
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yourls (http://yourls.org/)
- Written in PHP
- Deployments listed at http://yourls.org/#Showcase
- Active development
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Yourls is an actively maintained, full-featured URL shortener written
in PHP. It has a documented API [1], support for requested shortcuts
(i.e. use http://short/myshortlink instead of forcing
http://short/alVYn), built in statistics and a plugin interface.
The documentation is decent and there were no big surprises on
installation.
The downside to yourls is that it would take some work if we wanted to
provide a public html interface or to customize the admin interface.
I'm not sure that we really want a public html interface since our use
case would be AutoQA only and having a config file based auto system
would be acceptable since we don't need many users.