Using Nginx As A Simple URL Shortener
For a long time I used bit.ly (and tinyurl before that) to provide friends and students with short URLs. But that was not perfect. Using bit.ly meant I lost branding control, and that the URLs I wanted were not always available.
Owning a domain and a VPS makes it trivial to build your own url shortener. Here's how.
Shortening URLs with nginx
A URL shortener is just an HTTP server that responds with 301 when known shortcuts are accessed. The following nginx configuration does the trick:
server {
listen 127.0.0.1:80;
server_name s.ynonperek.com;
location /ddg {
return 301 https://www.duckduckgo.com;
}
}
And now you can visit http://s.ynonperek.com/ddg to reach duckduckgo.