When a user visits the site, she is presented with a form. She can enter the URL she would like to shorten, and the system will automatically generate a short URL for her to copy.

The long URL is stored as the base_url of a Link instance. When the form is submitted, the LinkManager runs find_or_create, searching for a Link that already exists with the entered base_url. If one exists, it will be returned and the user will see the short_url, which is a concatenation of the domain (settings.DOMAIN) and the randomly-generated short_string. If one does not exist, a new one will be created with this base_url and a short_string will be randomly generated in generate_short_string.

When a user navigates to a short_url, the redirect view will search for a Link that exists with a matching short_string and redirect to its base_url if it exists, rendering a 404 if it does not.

An admin is able to log in and see the entire list of Links that have been created.

• Clone the repo and cd into the directory.
• I've checked the sqlite file into VC, so you shouldn't need to run migrations, but if you do, run python manage.py migrate.
• You can create an admin user with python manage.py createsuperuser.
• I have the DOMAIN constant in settings.py set to "http://localhost:8000". To run the local server with this configuration, run python manage.py runserver localhost:8000. In a browser, go to localhost:8000 to use the site.
• You can also log in as the admin user you created at /admin to see the list of Links in the database.
• You can run tests with python manage.py test urlshortener.