Lil - High-Performance URL Shortener

Lil is a fast URL shortener built in Go, designed with scalability and extensibility in mind.

Key Features

• Fast: Uses in-memory cache alongside SQLite for high performance
• Platform-Specific Redirects: Intelligently route users based on their device
  • Custom redirects for iOS, Android, and macOS
  • Fallback URLs for unsupported platforms
  • Device detection using User-Agent headers
• Flexible Analytics: Supports multiple analytics providers out of the box
  • Plausible Analytics integration
  • Access log provider for analysis with tools like GoAccess
  • Custom webhook support for easy integration with other services
• Admin UI: Clean, responsive dashboard built with Vue.js
• Monitoring: Built-in Prometheus metrics for observability
• URL Management:
  • Custom slugs support
  • URL expiration
  • Title and metadata storage
  • Pagination and search in admin UI

Architecture Overview

• Storage: SQLite for persistence + In-memory cache for performance
• Async Analytics: Background workers handle analytics dispatch without impacting redirect performance
• Extensible: Easy to add new analytics providers through a simple interface
• API: RESTful JSON API for programmatic access
• Metrics: Prometheus metrics for monitoring redirects, cache size, etc.

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Create URL

Dashboard

Dark Mode

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Getting Started

Using Docker

The easiest way to run Lil is using Docker:

docker run -p 7000:7000 \
  -v $(pwd)/config.toml:/app/config.toml \
  -v $(pwd)/urls.db:/app/urls.db \
  ghcr.io/mr-karan/lil:latest

Using Docker Compose

A complete example with persistent storage:

docker compose up -d

See docker-compose.yml for a production-ready setup.

Manual Installation

1. Download the latest release
2. Configure via config.toml
3. Run the binary
4. Access admin UI at /admin

Configuration

See config.toml for all available options. Key sections:

[server]
address = ":7000"

[db]
path = "urls.db"

[analytics]
enabled = true
num_workers = 2

[analytics.providers.plausible]
endpoint = "http://plausible:8000/api/event"

API Documentation

See docs/api.md for detailed API documentation.

Domain Setup

Lil supports running on separate domains for public URL shortening and admin interface:

Configuration

1. Set your public domain in config.toml:

[app]
public_url = "https://lil.io"  # Base URL for shortened URLs

Architecture

The application can be deployed with two separate domains. For eg the following config can be referred for production deployments:

Nginx Configuration Example

# Public URL shortener
server {
    listen 80;
    server_name lil.io;

    # Block access to admin interface and API
    location ~ ^/(admin|api) {
        return 403;
    }

    # Forward everything else to the application
    location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:7000;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    }
}

# Admin interface
server {
    listen 80;
    server_name liladmin.internal;

    # Only allow internal network access
    allow 10.0.0.0/8;
    allow 172.16.0.0/12;
    allow 192.168.0.0/16;
    deny all;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:7000;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    }
}

License

LICENSE

Contributing

Contributions welcome! Please read our contributing guidelines before submitting PRs.