A Simple Cloudflare Workers ShortURL Forwarder

Setup your own serverless personalised/bitly/tinyURL forwarder for free on Cloudflare Workers.

Features

• set up on a sub-domain you already own (or register a slick new short domain) and use it for redirects, e.g. thesom.au/github => github.com/theprojectsomething
• the code is forwarding-domain agnostic, so domain names can be switched out without updating code
• takes a list of direct and dynamic routes (see the examples below) and 301 redirects incoming requests
• pass a ?debug search param to get a json response
• lists are currently static & defined in the worker

Defining routes

Routes are currently defined and edited directly in the worker (src/index.js). There are two types of route:

1. Direct routes
   These map routes directly from [/tiny-path] => [b.domain/not/so-tiny/path] based on an exact match of the path

2. Dynamic routes
   These allow a path to be appended to a redirect url, or optionally inserted using a $1 token, e.g:

   • [/tiny-path] => [b.domain] (without a token) redirects the following:

     • /tiny-path/dynamic?a=b => b.domain/dynamic?a=b
     • /tiny-path => 404 Not found¹

   • [/tiny-path] => [b.domain/not/so-tiny/$1/path/] (with a token) redirects the following:

     • /tiny-path/dynamic?a=b => b.domain/not/so-tiny/dynamic/path/?a=b
     • /tiny-path => 404 Not found¹

Quick start: deployed to the cloud in <2mins

1. clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/theprojectsomething/shorturl.git
cd shorturl

2. initialise the app to install wrangler:

npm init

3. add some routes to the worker (insert your favourite text editor here):

nano src/index.js

4. time to test your routes on localhost (try appending ?debug to the end of your requests):

npx wrangler dev src/index.js

5. publish it to the cloud

npx wrangler publish

And we're live on your workers subdomain! All that's left to do is connect your custom domain.

Potential improvements:

• lean on e.g. KV storage for route storage and lookup
• admin mode via e.g. basic auth / HMAC tokens
• API / web interface
• something else? Let me know!

Footnotes

1. Note the second case in both dynamic examples above. If no path is appended to a dynamic route it will return a 404 Not found. If you want to allow for this, use a direct route in addition to the dynamic one. ↩ ↩²