I am building an open-source, highly scalable, and low-cost . URL shortener with Cloudflare KV By low-cost I mean, just $5 per month on Cloudflare worker and a free plan for basic requirement Idea At DaySchedule, we had many customers upvote a URL shortener feature with auto-expirable links to book an appointment instead of sharing their original URL. So, I decided to try Cloudflare for this project - By leveraging Cloudflare KV's capabilities, the goal was to develop a solution that offered not only URL shortening but also customization options, analytics, and scalability, all while maintaining a significantly lower cost compared to our established services on AWS. Features Expirable links using option on KV cacheTtl Custom domain using Cloudflare for SaaS Analytics using Worker analytics API I used by for API routing, and it's blazing fast and offers Cloudflare pages template to build Edge projects quickly. hono.dev @yusukebe Here is an example of from their docs - server.ts import { Hono } from 'hono'
const app = new Hono()

app.get('/', (c) => c.text('Hono!'))

export default app Controller The API is all I need to create, update, and manage the short links. /links const links = new Hono<{ Bindings: Bindings }>();

links.post(
  '/',
  validator('json', (value, c) => {
    const parsed = linkSchema.safeParse(value);
    if (!parsed.success) {
      return c.json(parsed, 400);
    }
    return parsed.data as ShortLink;
  }),
  async (ctx) => {
    const data = ctx.req.valid('json');
    // Set expire_at if given, or fallback to 1 month expiry
    const expireAt = data.expire_at
      ? dayjs(data.expire_at).unix()
      : dayjs().add(1, 'month').unix();
    if (expireAt <= dayjs().unix()) {
      return ctx.json(
        { message: 'The expire_at must be greater then current date time' },
        400
      );
    }

    let key = data.key || nanoid(7);
    let exists = await ctx.env.SHORTLINKS.get(key);
    while (exists) {
      key = nanoid(7);
      exists = await ctx.env.SHORTLINKS.get(key);
    }
    await ctx.env.SHORTLINKS.put(key, JSON.stringify(data), {
      expiration: expireAt,
    });
    return ctx.json(
      { ...data, key: key, short_url: `https://idm.in/${key}` },
      200
    );
  }
); Code explanations - This code is request to create short links. Here's a breakdown of the code to explain what I am doing: POST It creates an instance of the Hono object. const links = new Hono<{ Bindings: Bindings }>(): Validation with zod - The function is used as a middleware for validating the incoming JSON payload defined in . validator('json', (value, c) => {...}): linkSchema Set expiration: Checks if an expiry date is provided in the payload. If not, it sets an expiry date one month from the current date and time. Generates a unique key for the link using or uses the provided key from the payload if available. nanoid(7) Stores the link data (converted to a string) in the Cloudflare KV ( ) with an expiration time based on the calculated expiry date. JSON SHORTLINKS Demo The demo is available on , it's free to use and open-sourced on Github to . IDM build your custom URL shortener You can clone the repo to deploy on your Cloudflare account. Don’t forget to on GitHub to show your support :-) Star the repository Also published here.

How I Built a Low-Cost URL Shortener With Cloudflare KV

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