Most of us are familiar with seeing URLs like bit.ly or t.co on our Twitter or Facebook feeds. These are examples of shortened URLs, which are a short alias or pointer to a longer page link. For example, I can send you the shortened URL http://bit.ly/SaaYw5 that will forward you to a very long Google URL with search results on how to iron a shirt.

Design and implement an API for short URL creation Implement forwarding of short URLs to the original ones There should be some form of persistent storage The application should be distributed as one or more Docker images

Design and implement an API for gathering different statistics

Treat this as a real project. It should be readable, maintainable, and extensible where appropriate.

The implementation should preferably be in Java, however any language can be used.

If you will transfer it to another team - it should be clear how to work with it and what is going on.

You should send us a link to a Git repository that we will be able to clone.

• Spring Boot 2 (to keep the project within 2 hours)
• Elastic Stack 6 (best match for statistics gathering, mining and visualizing)

git clone https://github.com/deroude/shortlink.git deroude-shortlink
cd deroude-shortlink
mvn clean install
docker-compose up --build

The following methods are available:

POST http://localhost:8080/link BODY http://your.address.com/with/a/long/path will yeld a hash.

GET http://localhost:8080/to/hash will redirect to the original URL.

The latter method will also add information to Elastic about the redirect (hash, origin & timestamp).

To access Kibana, navigate to http://localhost:5601

At this stage, the app provides naive implementations for URL processing and short link generation, as well as for a distributed numeric sequence mechanism.

In production, this application is likely to be split in two: the URL provisioning app and the URL serving app, corresponding to the LinkController and RedirectController respectively.

To run the application outside Docker:

• change application.yml to point to localhost instead of elasticsearch
• run the Elastic stack using docker-compose -f docker-compose_elk.yml up, then run the application from the IDE or shell.