URL shorteners, use them for when you want to share an easy to remember link. You can use a service like Bitly or TinyURL or any of the other ones out there already, or you could make it something you'd want to use and have a bit more of a connection to it by making your own!

In the past I've made a personal URL shorteners with a Netlify _redirects file and with a Vercel vercel.json file. In this post I'm going to make a URL shortener with SvelteKit.

I will use a SvelteKit endpoint to redirect the requests made to it. This will redirect the source URL to the target or destination URL.

An example could be the URL given to this project, say https://svort.li. anything after the TLD (.li) will be the source so https://svort.li/me will be redirected to the destination URL for that source https://scottspence.com.

In the previous two projects I made there wasn't anything in the way of a front-end framework as they were just configuration files to do the redirects on the server.

This is still pretty much the same as it will be taking an incoming request on the server (in the SvelteKit endpoint) and redirecting it.

Setup the project

I'll scaffold out a skeleton SvelteKit using the following command:

npm init svelte@next svort-urls

I'll follow the prompts, I'll be yes to all the prompts there. Which are.

? Which Svelte app template? › - Use arrow-keys. Return to submit.
    SvelteKit demo app
❯   Skeleton project

✔ Which Svelte app template? › Skeleton project
✔ Use TypeScript? … Yes
✔ Add ESLint for code linting? … Yes
✔ Add Prettier for code formatting? … Yes
✔ Add Playwright for browser testing? … Yes

I'm not going to be covering browser testing in this post, but it's nice to have the config there if you need it.😊

Create the endpoint

In the routes folder I'll create a new [slug].ts file.

touch src/routes/'[slug]'.ts

The [slug].ts file is an endpoint, a HTTP endpoint in SvelteKit you can use HTTP methods in endpoints. So, if I want to GET some data in a route I can access it via these special SvelteKit files.

In this case I'm using a GET method so the source can be redirected to the destination.

export const get = async () => {
  return {
    headers: { Location: '/' },
    status: 301,
  }
}

This will accept anything after root path (/) and redirect it at the moment back to the homepage /.

So going to localhost:3000/me will redirect to localhost:3000/.

That is pretty much it!

For the list of links I'll be using a local config file, but you can use something like a CMS or a database to control this.

Add source and destination URLs

I'm going to add the source and destination URLs to a config file. In SvelteKit the place for this would be in a lib folder.

# create the lib folder
mkdir src/lib
# create a file for the urls
touch src/lib/urls-list.ts

In the urls-list.ts file I'll add the source and destination URLs I want, I'll add some example one here.

export const urls = [
  {
    source: '/me',
    destination: 'https://scottspence.com',
  },
  {
    source: '/twitter',
    destination: 'https://twitter.com/spences10',
  },
  {
    source: '/git',
    destination: 'https://github.com/spences10',
  },
]

Redirect to the destination URL

With my list of short links in place, I can use them in the [slug].ts endpoint. so going to localhost:3000/me I will now want redirect to https://scottspence.com.

I'll need a way to know what the source URL is in the endpoint so I can destructure that out of the context passed tp the endpoint.

Let's take a quick look at what we get in the context (or ctx) object.

export const get = async ctx => {
  console.log(ctx)
  return {
    headers: { Location: '/' },
    status: 301,
  }
}

So now if I navigate to localhost:3000/something I'll see the following output in the terminal:

{
  request: Request {
    size: 0,
    follow: 20,
    compress: true,
    counter: 0,
    agent: undefined,
    highWaterMark: 16384,
    insecureHTTPParser: false,
    [Symbol(Body internals)]: {
      body: null,
      stream: null,
      boundary: null,
      disturbed: false,
      error: null
    },
    [Symbol(Request internals)]: {
      method: 'GET',
      redirect: 'follow',
      headers: [Object],
      parsedURL: [URL],
      signal: null,
      referrer: undefined,
      referrerPolicy: ''
    }
  },
  url: URL {
    href: 'http://localhost:3000/something',
    origin: 'http://localhost:3000',
    protocol: 'http:',
    username: '',
    password: '',
    host: 'localhost:3000',
    hostname: 'localhost',
    port: '3000',
    pathname: '/something',
    search: '',
    searchParams: URLSearchParams {},
    hash: ''
  },
  params: { slug: 'something' },
  locals: {},
  platform: undefined
}

So what I'm interested in here is the url object, more specifically the url.pathname. This is going to help me identify where I want the request to be redirected to.

url: URL {
  href: 'http://localhost:3000/something',
  origin: 'http://localhost:3000',
  protocol: 'http:',
  username: '',
  password: '',
  host: 'localhost:3000',
  hostname: 'localhost',
  port: '3000',
  pathname: '/something',
  search: '',
  searchParams: URLSearchParams {},
  hash: ''
}

I could also use params.slug object for this as well.

params: { slug: 'something' },

In this example I'll be using the url object. So I'll destructure the url object out of the context object and import the urls-list file.

import { urls } from '$lib/urls-list'

export const get = async ({ url }) => {
  return {
    headers: { Location: '/' },
    status: 301,
  }
}

Then I can get a redirect out of the urls array. I'll declare this this as a [redirect] variable.

So I'll see what I get if I log out the contents of [redirect] now, I'm going to want to filter for anything that matches the url.pathname from urls-list file, so for now I'll console.log out the results:

import { urls } from '$lib/urls-list'

export const get = async ({ url }) => {
  const [redirect] = urls.filter(item => {
    console.log(item)
  })

  return {
    headers: { Location: '/' },
    status: 301,
  }
}

Now if I navigate to localhost:3000/something I'll see the following in the terminal:

{ source: '/me', destination: 'https://scottspence.com' }
{ source: '/twitter', destination: 'https://twitter.com/spences10' }
{ source: '/git', destination: 'https://github.com/spences10' }

Sweet! So now I can use some logic to determine if the url.pathname matches what's in the urls array.

So, with the item I'm using in the filter I can compare against the url.pathname. If there's a valid match I can get the destination from the urls array.

import { urls } from '$lib/urls-list'

export const get = async ({ url }) => {
  const [redirect] = urls.filter(item => item.source === url.pathname)

  if (redirect) {
    return {
      headers: { Location: redirect.destination },
      status: 301,
    }
  } else if (!redirect && url.pathname.length > 1) {
    return {
      headers: { Location: '/' },
      status: 301,
    }
  } else return {}
}

I can use an if to check for a valid match. If there's a valid match then set the headers.Location to the destination from the urls array.

If it doesn't match I'll redirect to the homepage (/) and have a final catch to return an empty object.

Conclusion

That's it! I've created a simple redirect in SvelteKit that will take an incoming URL and redirect to a destination URL.

I can now use the homepage as a landing page for my short URLs so anyone coming to the site can check out any of the available links.

Further exploration

This has been a bit of an eye opener for me so I think I'm going to experiment with using something in the way of a backend. Undecided yet but I could make this something for users and not just a personal project for me. This would involve authentication and something to store the user data i.e. a CMS (more than likely GraphCMS) or a database of some sort, I've not checked out planet scale yet so could take a look at that.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Rainlife over on the Svelte Discord for suggesting the use of HEAD (as I'm only interested in the header of the request). Also thanks to Jordan (also on the Svelte Discord) for giving me this handy MDN link for Redirections in HTTP.

Also Dana Woodman on Dev.to for using redirects in SvelteKit endpoints. I was using redirect instead of setting the headers.

Make a URL Shortener with SvelteKit