Golinks

Golinks is an internal URL shortener that organizes your company links into easily rememberable keywords. If you’re on the company network, you can type in go/keyword in your browser, and that will redirect you to the expanded url.

History of Golinks

Benjamin Staffin at Google developed a golink system that introduced the "go/" domain and allowed Googlers to simply use the shortlink “go/link” in their browser. Benjamin described golinks as "AOL keywords for the corporate network."

Why

I developed this to scratch my own itch mostly and to learn Go. It was built intending to be run locally on localhost using a sqllite database. It is meant to be lightweight and simple. I was inspired by @thesephist's tools and the concept of building software for yourself. The backend API is written in Go and the frontend in Vue.js as a single page app.

Setup

Install

Go to the releases page and download the latest release. Or, use my own tool: kelp

kelp add crhuber/golinks
kelp install golinks

Database

Setup a path where you want your golinks sqllite database to live and set the environment variable

mkdir ~/.golinks
export GOLINKS_DB="/Users/username/.golinks/golinks.db"

You can also use postgres or mysql database using a valid DSN like:

export GOLINKS_DBTYPE="mysql"
export GOLINKS_DB="user:pass@tcp(127.0.0.1:3306)/dbname?charset=utf8mb4&parseTime=True&loc=Local"

Run

Run

golinks serve

Use the following flags to configure database, port and static folder

Flags:
  -d, --db string       DB DSN or SQLLite location path. (default "./data/golinks.db")
  -t, --dbtype string   Database type (default "sqllite")
  -h, --help            help for serve
  -p, --port int        Port to run Application server on (default 8998)

All the flags can also be set via environment variables

GOLINKS_DB
GOLINKS_DBTYPE
GOLINKS_PORT

Run At Startup

To run as an Agent on boot for mac edit and copy the io.intra.golinks.plist file to ~/Library/LaunchAgents directory. See launchd.info

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/io.intra.golinks.plist
launchctl start io.intra.golinks
tail -f /tmp/golinks.log
tail -f /private/var/log/com.apple.xpc.launchd/launchd.log

Docker

Build image and run

docker build . -t crhuber/golinks:latest
docker run -p 8998:8998 crhuber/golinks

DNS Setup

• The automatic way: use dev-proxy

• The manual way:

Add a host record to point to your golinks server. If running locally, edit your local hostfile:sudo nano /etc/hosts

127.0.0.2       go.internal

Add the host suffix to your search domains. System Preferences>Network>Advanced>DNS>Search Domains:

Search Domains:
.internal

Port Redirection Setup

• The automatic way: use dev-proxy

• The manual way:

If you have a local instance of golinks running on your machine, you will need to append the port everytime you want to use golinks in the browser ie: go:8998/foo which is not ideal. To get around this we can run a few hacks.

Create an alias for 127.0.0.2 to point to loopback:

sudo ifconfig lo0 alias 127.0.0.2

To persist this after reboot, edit and copy io.intra.ifconfig.plist to system LaunchDaemons

sudo cp io.intra.ifconfig.plist  /Library/LaunchDaemons/

Create a port forwarding rule to forward traffic destined for 127.0.0.2:80 to be redirected to local golinks on port 8998

echo "rdr pass inet proto tcp from any to 127.0.0.2 port 80 -> 127.0.0.1 port 8998" | sudo pfctl -ef -

Edit hosts file to modify go.internal to point to 127.0.0.2

127.0.0.2       go.internal

Display current port forwarding

sudo pfctl -s nat

Remove port forwarding

sudo pfctl -F all -f /etc/pf.conf

FAQ

• How can I see all the links available

  http://go:8998/

• How do programmatic links work?

  Create short links that inject variables by using {*}. For example: gh/{*} to link to https://github.com/{*}. So when a user types gh/torvalds the {*} will be replaced and the browser will be redirected to https://github.com/torvalds

Troubleshooting

• If you change the port of the API. Be sure that you change the frontend index.html to connect to the same port

Developing

I use air for live reloading Go apps. Just run

> air

watching .
building...
running...
INFO[0000] Starting server on port :8998

Roadmap

• Add CLI interface to adding/removing/searching links from command line
• Browser extension (maybe)
• UI Refactor

Contributing

If you find bugs, please open an issue first. If you have feature requests, I probably will not honor it because this project is being built mostly to suit my personal workflow and preferences.