Tiny

Provides generation and serving of shortened URLs in a Laravel application.

Overview

Basic Steps

• Install this package in your Laravel application.
• Run the database migration to create the table for storing URLs.
• Add URLs manually via the web UI, or programatically via the TinyService class.

Architecture

All interaction with the database is handled by a repository class implementing the TinyQueryInterface (by default, the TinyQuery class). The concrete query class is bound via the package configuration, so it's easy to create and deploy a new query class for an alternate data source (NoSQL, key-value store, etc), without hacking the package itself.

Installation

From your Laravel application's root directory, install via Composer:

composer require viewflex/tiny

Add the TinyServiceProvider to the list of providers in config/app.php. Note: This is not necessary when using Laravel 5.5 or greater with package discovery enabled.

Viewflex\Tiny\TinyServiceProvider::class,

Migration

Laravel 5.4 or greater can run the migration directly from the package.

php artisan migrate

For older versions of Laravel, publish the migration first.

php artisan vendor:publish  --tag='tiny-data'

Configuration

The tiny.php config file contains the package settings.

'caching'       => [
	'active'        =>  true,
	'minutes'       =>  1440
],

'query'         => '\Viewflex\Tiny\Queries\TinyQuery',

'tables'        => [
	'urls'          => 'tiny_urls'
]

If you need to customize the configuration, run this command to publish the config file to the project's config directory:

php artisan vendor:publish  --tag='tiny'

This will also publish the UI view template to your project's resources/views/vendor/tiny directory. Unless you need to customize one of these files it is not necessary to publish them.

Caching

By default, URL lookups are cached, which greatly increases performance. You can disable this or change the cache lifetime to suit your needs.

Query

This is the repository class that interacts with the data source. Any class implementing the TinyQueryInterface can be used in place of the default, as needed.

Tables

Here the table name is aliased, to allow using whatever table name you want without hacking the package.

Usage

Adding URLs

The TinyController provides a UI for adding URLs. Simply enter a URL and click the Save button. The URL will be displayed along with it's alias in the resulting message. The route <mydomain>/tiny/create is used to access the UI from a web browser. It is also quite easy to integrate the TinyService class into your own code, to generate and store URLs programatically.

Serving URLs

Once stored, a URL can be accessed via the <mydomain>/tiny/{hash} package route. Of course, if necessary you can also create an additional route to hit the same controller method.

Tests

Tests can be run in the usual way, as described in the test documentation.

License

This software is offered for use under the MIT License.