django-shorturls

A custom URL shortening app for Django, including easy rev=canonical support.

Most code was originally by Simon Willison; see http://simonwillison.net/2009/Apr/11/revcanonical/ for details. Improved slightly and packaged by Jacob Kaplan-Moss.

Patches welcome: http://github.com/bfirsh/django-shorturls

Usage

So, you want to host your own short URLs on your Django site:

1. In your settings, define a set of prefixes for short URLs:

   SHORTEN_MODELS = {
       'A': 'myapp.animal',
       'V': 'myapp.vegetable',
       'M': 'myapp.mineral'
   }
   

   The keys are string prefixes; they can be any string, actually, but since we're going for short a single character is probably good.

   Values are the (hopefully-familiar) "<app-name>.<model-class>" used by Django to identify a model. Remember: app-name is the (case-sensitive) last bit of your app's name in INSTALLED_APPS, and <model-class> is your model class's name, lowercased.

   Make sure your models have a get_absolute_url() method defined.

2. Wire up the redirect view by adding to your URLconf:

   ('^short/', include('shorturls.urls'))
   

3. If you'd like to quickly link to shortened URLs in your templates, stick "shorturls" in INSTALLED_APPS, and then in your templates do:

   {% load shorturl %}
   <a href="{% shorturl object %}">...</a>
   

   (where object is a model instance).

   Alternatively:

   {% load shorturl %}
   {% revcanonical object %}
   

   This generates the whole <link rev="canonical" href="..."> tag for you.

That's it.

If you'd like more control, keep reading.

Settings

Available settings are:

SHORTEN_MODELS

You've seen this one.

SHORT_BASE_URL

If defined, the shorturl and revcanonical template tags will prefix generated URLs with this value. Use this if you've got a shorter domain name you'd like to use for small URLs.

For example, given SHORT_BASE_URL = 'http://exm.pl/', {% shorturl obj %} would return something like http://exm.pl/AbCd.

SHORTEN_FULL_BASE_URL

The domain to redirect to when redirecting away from the small URL. Again, you'll use this if your short URL base and your "real" site differ.

If not defined, the redirect view will try to guess the proper domain by consulting the django.contrib.sites framework, if installed, or the requested domain, if not.

SHORTURLS_DEFAULT_CONVERTER

The converter that is used to translate between short URLs and model IDs. Defaults to the built in base 62 conversion.

Available converters:

• shorturls.baseconv.base62 Base 62 encoding.
• shorturls.baseconv.base32 Douglas Crockford's base 32.
• shorturls.baseconv.hexconv Hex encoding.
• shorturls.baseconv.bin Binary encoding, because why not.