Question

I want to write my own URL shortener using php and mysql as a tester to see how much I know about the two languages? However I don’t know what is needed to do so or where to start. Please could someone give me a list of what needs to be done in order to create/write a successful URL shortener?

Answer 1

All you need is a short domain name.

Then you can have a simple MySQL table with two columns: Id (the primary key with auto increment) and Url. Which should probably be a TEXT or something. Since varchar 255 might be too short.

Then set up your .htaccess so that a url like domain.com/a21s1 gets converted to domain.com?url=a21s1

That’d be something along the lines of:

RewriteRule ^(?:.*)domain\.com/(.*)/?$ domain.com?url=$1

Then in php do something like:

if(isset($_GET['url'])){
    $url = base_convert((int)$_GET['url'],36,10);
    $result = mysql_query('SELECT `Url` FROM `My Table` WHERE `Id` = '.$url);
    $row = mysql_fetch_row($result);
    $url = $row[0];
}else
    $url = 'http://domain.com/yourhomepage';

header('location: '.$url);

You’d also want to have sanity checks when users input a new url to add you would regex it to make sure it’s a url, and if it’s missing http:// prepend it to the url.