Netlify Short Links | Mark Skelton

Netlify has support for creating redirects and rewrites using the _redirects file syntax. Borrowing from an idea I saw from Kent C. Dodds and @caarlos0, I built a script to make it easy to create short links for my website or other sites that I can then access via my newly minted go.mskelton.dev subdomain.

Here is the script in it’s entirety, feel free to peruse from the comments:

#!/bin/bash
args=()
status=""

# Parse the command line args
while [[ $# -gt 0 ]]; do
	case "$1" in
	--rewrite)
		status="200"
		shift
		;;
	*)
		args+=("$1")
		shift
		;;
	esac
done

url="${args[0]}"
short_code="${args[1]}"

# Change to the project directory
cd "$HOME/dev/go.mskelton.dev" || exit 1

# Generate a random short code if one is not provided
if test -z "$short_code"; then
	short_code="$(openssl rand -hex 5 | head -c 5)"
fi

# Require the URL to shorten
if test -z "$url"; then
	echo "Usage: short <url> [code] --rewrite"
	exit 1
fi

# Ensure the URL is valid
if [[ ! $url =~ ^https:// ]]; then
	echo "Invalid URL"
	exit 1
fi

# Ensure the redirects file exists and the short code is not already in use
if ! test -f _redirects; then
	echo "No _redirects file found"
	exit 1
elif grep -q "/$short_code " _redirects; then
	echo "Short code already exists"
	exit 1
fi

# Add the redirect to the file
if test -n "$status"; then
	echo "/$short_code $url $status" >>_redirects
else
	echo "/$short_code $url" >>_redirects
fi

# Sort the file
out="$(column -s ' ' -t -c 2 <_redirects | sort | uniq)"

# Remove the old wildcard
echo "$out" | grep -v "^/[* ]" >_redirects

# Add a newline
echo >>_redirects

# Add the wildcard back
echo "$out" | grep "^/[* ]" >>_redirects

# Commit the changes
git add _redirects
git commit -m "Add short link for \`/$short_code\`"
git push

Using the script is as simple as this:

short https://www.google.com google

This creates the shortlink: go.mskelton.dev/google that redirects to https://www.google.com. The nice thing with this approach is that Netlify handles all the redirect traffic so I don’t need that load on my main site, which helps with reliability of my short links. If I take down my main site (which I do from time to time 😂), the short links will still work.