How To Create Your Own Link Shortener In Rust (beginner-friendly project)

You probably know tools like Bitly, t.ly, TinyURL, and many more. They are all link (or URL) shorteners, but did you know that their core logic isn't that difficult to implement yourself?

What if you could create your very own link shortener, in Rust, as a perfect learning project and one that actually provides yourself some value?

This is what this video is about. We implement our very own link shortener in Rust and use the following technologies:

- Rust (as our most beloved programming language of choice)
- Axum (as the web server)
- sqlx (as our persistence library without the need for a fully-fledged ORM)
- Prometheus (for metrics)
- Open Telemetry (for tracing and logging)
- And a few more

The best thing about this? When you are done, you can easily containerize the application and deploy it anywhere you like. Only some further setup (depending on where you deploy it), and you can shorten your own links and place them everywhere you like!

----------

🕖 Timestamps:

00:00 Intro
00:44 How our link shortener looks and works
03:02 Setting up the project
15:08 The redirect route
23:06 Creating short links
30:07 Modifying short links
35:00 Collecting and fetching link engagement statistics
46:09 Authentication
57:08 Implementing a retry for creating short links
01:02:03 Outro

----------

❓ Who the hell am I?

Hey, if we haven't met yet, I'm Oliver, and I'm a software engineer. I started programming over two decades ago as a hobby. Nowadays, I design and build huge distributed systems in the video on demand space.

----------

🙌🏻 You can find me here:

My blog: https://oliverl.ink/blog

My Twitter: Twitter: oliverjumpertz

• #science_technology
• #rust
• #tutorial