🔗 UrlShortener: Real-Time URL Shortening and Analytics Platform

UrlShortener is a powerful, modern URL shortening service that allows users to instantly generate short links, securely manage them, and track comprehensive real-time analytics. Built with a robust Spring Boot backend and a responsive React frontend, UrlShortener is designed to be fast, scalable, and user-friendly.

📚 Table of Contents

• Overview
• Key Features
• Tech Stack
• Getting Started
• Screenshots
• Contributions
• License
• Author

Overview

UrlShortener provides a complete solution for link management. Beyond just shortening long URLs, it offers detailed, real-time insights into link usage, including the total number of clicks and individual user interactions. The platform ensures a personalized and secure experience through full user authentication and a modern, fast user interface.

Key Features

• ✅ Shorten Links: Instantly generate concise, shareable short URLs for any long link.
• 📈 Analytics Dashboard: Access a powerful dashboard to track the performance of every link, showing the total number of clicks.
• 👤 User Tracking: Monitor granular link usage, tracking individual clicks associated with authenticated users.
• 🔒 User Authentication: Secure login and signup functionality powered by JWT for a personalized and private link management experience.
• ✨ Modern UI: A smooth, reactive frontend built with ReactJS for an excellent user experience.
• 🚀 Fast & Scalable: A robust and efficient backend powered by Spring Boot ensures high performance and scalability.

Tech Stack

UrlShortener is a full-stack application leveraging modern, industry-standard technologies:

Backend (API)

Technology	Purpose
Spring Boot	Core framework for the RESTful API, providing speed and stability.
Spring Security	Handling authorization, user authentication, and securing endpoints.
JWT Authentication	Secure, stateless authentication for API communication.
MySQL/PostgreSQL	Relational database for persistence of short links, long URLs, user data, and click analytics.

Frontend (UI)

Technology	Purpose
ReactJS	Library for building the responsive and dynamic Single Page Application (SPA).
React Router	Managing client-side routing and navigation within the application.
Axios	Efficient, promise-based HTTP client for communicating with the Spring Boot API.

DevOps

Technology	Purpose
Docker	Containerization platform to package applications with all dependencies, ensuring consistency across environments.
Docker Compose	Tool for defining and managing multi-container Docker applications using a single configuration file.
Kubernetes (K8s)	Container orchestration platform for automated deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
Jenkins	Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) automation server for building, testing, and deploying applications.
Terraform	Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool for provisioning and managing cloud resources in a consistent and automated way.
Ansible	Configuration management and automation tool for provisioning servers and deploying applications efficiently.
Prometheus	Monitoring and alerting toolkit designed for collecting and querying time-series metrics from applications and infrastructure.
Grafana	Visualization and analytics platform used to create dashboards and monitor metrics collected by Prometheus and other sources.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)	Cloud service provider used for hosting, scaling, and managing applications and infrastructure.
Render	Cloud platform for hosting and deploying web applications and services with automated builds and scalability.
Vercel	Frontend deployment platform optimized for React and other JavaScript frameworks, enabling fast global delivery and easy CI/CD integration.

Getting Started

Follow these steps to set up and run UrlShortener locally.

Prerequisites

• Java Development Kit (JDK 17 or newer)
• Node.js and npm (or yarn)
• A running instance of MySQL or PostgreSQL database.
• Maven (for Spring Boot build)

1. Database Setup

1. Update the database connection properties in the backend's application.properties file with your credentials:

   spring.datasource.url: jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/urlshortener_db
   spring.datasource.username: your_db_user
   spring.datasource.password: your_db_password

2. Backend Setup

1. Navigate to the backend directory (or equivalent).
2. Build the project using Maven:

   mvn clean install

3. Run the application:

   java -jar target/urlshortener-backend-*.jar
   # OR if using an IDE like IntelliJ, run the main application class.

   The API should start running on http://localhost:9090.

3. Frontend Setup

1. Navigate to the frontend directory (or equivalent).
2. Install the dependencies:

   npm install

3. Start the development server:

   npm run dev

   The React application should open in your browser at http://localhost:5173 (or the configured port).

Screenshots

Contribution

We welcome contributions! If you have suggestions for new features, bug fixes, or improvements, please:

1. Fork the repository.
2. Create a new feature branch (git checkout -b feature/amazing-feature).
3. Commit your changes (git commit -m 'feat: Add amazing feature').
4. Push to the branch (git push origin feature/amazing-feature).
5. Open a Pull Request.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License – see the LICENSE file for details.

Author

Abhishek Rajput