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.
