How to create your own custom URL shortener in 10 minutes for free & deploy to GitHub 🚀

sorry for the long post title - that's tldr;

🔗 mnml URL - Modern URL shortener with support for custom alias

(short form for minimal URL 🤦‍♂️)

Feel free to contribute on GitHub

While the rest of us were copy-and-pasting mumbo-jumbo from URL shorteners into our Twitter accounts, sites like The New York Times were smugly tweeting their links using shortened URLs like "nyti.ms." Frankly, this made me a little jealous 💁‍♂️

That's why I created my own freaking url shortener with pure JavaScript + HTML + CSS ❤

Did I mention this is all free of charge and 100% open source? Yes.

mnml URL makes it easy for the average Joe developer to create a custom URL shortener for free and deploy it to GitHub 🚀 You don't even need to own a site that gets about 17 million unique visitors per month 😏

Let's get started.

step 0: Goto jsonstore.io Click the purple COPY button to copy your endpoint.

step 1: Fork/clone mnml url repo on GitHub and optionally ⭐ star the project - show some ❤ love!

https://github.com/liyasthomas/mnmlurl

step 2: IMPORTANT: Find var endpoint on src/head.js file and replace it with your own endpoint which you copied from step 0.

var endpoint = "https://www.jsonstore.io/6b6xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxa98";
replace it with your endpoint 👆

step 3: Goto your repo settings > GitHub pages. Select master branch as source for deployment.

That's it! Site will be hosted on your_github_username.github.io/mnmlurl/src

EDIT 0: Minimal URL can be hosted on any website hosting services like GitHub/GitLab pages, Firebase/Heroku hosting, yoursite.com, etc. For hosting in such custom domains, Its advised to npm build and upload output folder. Hosting on GitHub pages was just for proof of concept.

EDIT 1: If you want to take development further, consider contributing on GitHub.

EDIT 2: IMPORTANT: Minimal URL is an experimental project. Don't shorten sensitive contents/URLs with it. jsonstore.io endpoints are always public making shortened URLs visible for everyone.

Here's some screenshots of mnmlurl

Bonus: I also created a Cross browser extension ✨ for mnmlurl.

Demo 🚀

Feel free to contribute on GitHub

If you want a heads up on my next projects, or just want to chat about the web, make sure to follow me @liyasthomas 💙.

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