The cakephp-bitly plugin provides a wrapper for the bit.ly API to shorten long urls.

You can install this plugin into your CakePHP application using composer.

Run the following command

composer require frankfoerster/cakephp-bitly

You can load the plugin using the shell command:

bin/cake plugin load FrankFoerster/Bitly

Or you can manually add the loading statement in the config/boostrap.php file of your application:

Plugin::load('FrankFoerster/Bitly');

To use the UrlShortener you have to provide your bitly login name and your bitly API key as config entries within /config/app.php.

return [
    ...
    
    'Bitly' => [
        'login' => 'YOUR_LOGIN',
        'apiKey' => 'YOUR_API_KEY',

        /**
         * @link: http://book.cakephp.org/3.0/en/core-libraries/httpclient.html#proxy-authentication
         *
         * e.g.:
         * -----
         * 'proxy' => [
         *   'username' => 'foo', // optional username set in request header
         *   'password' => 'bar', // optional password set in request header
         *   'proxy' => 'tcp://localhost:9000'
         * ]
         */
        'proxy' => false
    ],
    
    ...
];

To obtain an api key sign up at https://bitly.com/a/sign_up .

To use the url shortener you have to instatiate a new UrlShortener instance. It will setup your instance with the configured parameters automatically.

You can wrap your calls in a try catch block (see below), because the cakephp-bitly plugin throws custom exceptions that represent all possible error responses from the bitly API. They all extend from the BitlyException and can be handled separately via multiple catch blocks.

use FrankFoerster\Bitly\Exception\BitlyException;
use FrankFoerster\Bitly\UrlShortener;

$urlShortener = new UrlShortener();

try {
    $shortUrl = $urlShortener->shorten($myLongUrl);
} catch (BitlyException $e) {
    // handle any of the exceptions
}

The result of the shorten($url) call is a response object containing the data returned from the bit.ly API call. It consists of the following properties:

• new_hash - designates if this is the first time this long_url was shortened by this user. The return value will equal 1 the first time a long_url is shortened. It will also then be added to the user history.
• url - the actual Bitlink that should be used, and is a unique value for the given Bitly account.
• hash - a bitly hash for long_url which is unique to the given account.
• global_hash - a bitly hash for long_url which can be used to track aggregate stats across all Bitlinks that point to the same long_url.
• long_url - an echo back of the longUrl request parameter. This may not always be equal to the URL requested, as some URL normalization may occur (e.g., due to encoding differences, or case differences in the domain). This long_url will always be functionally identical the the request parameter.