This web app is a conventional link shortener; it can convert long and messy URLs into links that are shorter and more readable. This project uses ASP.NET Core with Razor Pages and Entity Framework. I created this project primarily to teach myself ASP.NET Core.

You can try it out here.

I’ve currently implemented the following:

• CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) functionality for shortened links.
• Simple authentication and authorization.
  • Each shortened link can be tied to an authenticated user. Only the owner of a link can edit or delete it.
  • Links created by unauthenticated users are stored in the user’s cookies. Users can still edit or delete links that are stored in their cookies.
  • Authenticated users can claim ownership of links if those links were created during an unauthenticated session on the same browser/device.
• Redirection from the shortened link to the full-length URL. This is the core feature of every link shortener.
• Ability to generate and download QR codes for shortened links.

In the future, I may add link analytics as well.

You’ll need an installation of the Dotnet 9.0 SDK. This page from Microsoft’s documentation explains how to install it on Windows. The simplest way is by running the following in a command prompt:

winget install Microsoft.DotNet.SDK.9

Microsoft provides separate instructions for Linux and MacOS.

After installing the Dotnet SDK, you’ll need to install Libman. Libman is a package manager for client-side dependencies in ASP.NET Core apps.

Libman can be installed by entering the following into a command prompt:

dotnet tool install -g Microsoft.Web.LibraryManager.Cli

After installing the Dotnet SDK and Libman, run a git clone on this repository. From the root project directory, run the following:

libman restore

This will install all of the necessary client-side dependencies.

You can run SmallUrl inside Visual Studio, or use the dotnet run command from the root project directory.

I found MonsterASP.net to be the most straightforward deployment option. To deploy the app with MonsterASP, I did the following:

1. Created an account with MonsterASP.
2. Created both a website and an MSSQL database through MonsterASP’s dashboard.
3. Obtained the (local, not remote) database connection string for the MSSQL database.
4. Created an environment variable for the website with a key of DB_CONN. I set the value of this environment variable to the full database connection string. Note that you can set environment variables in Websites > Scripting in MonsterASP’s dashboard.
5. Followed this guide from MonsterASP's documentation. This involves adding secrets provided by MonsterASP into the GitHub repository, so you'll need to fork this repo if you'd like to deploy a copy yourself.

You can also run this project with Docker, but I ultimately did not end up using Docker for deployment.

Assuming that you have both Docker and Docker Compose installed, you can run the project with the following command:

docker compose up

If you want the project to handle requests on ports 80 and 443 (as might be common in a real application), you can run the following:

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose-prod.yml up