How to start:

• clone this repo;

• Go to the repo folder url_shortener;

• Create a virtual environment python -m venv url_shortener (instead of python you might need python3);

• Activate it source url_shortener/bin/activate

• Install the requirements pip install -r requirements.txt;

• Set PYTHONPATH with current directory to export PYTHONPATH=current_folder/app

• In current folder file with environment variables can be created. As an example the one in a repo can be used.

• You can start an app with python run.py

• Form for creation a short url is accessle at http://127.0.0.1:5000/ if default env settings are used.

• To use it, you'll need to send a post request to http://localhost:5000/shorten with url and (optional) shortcode you want to use in form-data.

• You also can run tests with command pytest from the same folder (application should be stopped)

Next steps:

• Security: even obvious sending lots of requests won't end well for this application. It would be nice (at least) to limit amount of requests form one address, or make a authorization or something like that;
• Proper deployment. First step would be Docker containers with application and database (if we get rid of sqlite);
• Proper delpoyment-2. Now it runs in Flask debug mode which is not acceptable for production. We will have to use WSGI server.
• Proper database. Now it's sqlite, which is not the smartest choice. Since it's a key-value storage, Redis would work fine. Also, Redis would be nice if we wanted to delete shortcodes after some time (like 24h) because Redis can do it easily;
• Conflicts resolve: there are not so much of these shortcodes and if we do it a lot of times, we probably will have a conflict in database; Now in this case we'll have a unhandled error, but it would be nice to resolve it smarter;
• Security-2: since we're putting in our database user input, we have to handle malicious inputs, like js-injections, sql-injections etc.