URL Shortener (Node.js + Express + MongoDB) ✅

A minimal, easy-to-read URL shortener built with Node.js, Express and MongoDB. It provides API endpoints to create short URLs, redirect to the original URL, and fetch basic analytics for each short link.

---

🔧 Features

• Create a short URL for any target link (POST /url)
• Redirect shortId to the original URL and record visits (GET /:shortId)
• View analytics for a short URL (GET /url/analytics/:shortId)
• Simple MongoDB-backed persistence using Mongoose

---

🧩 Tech Stack

• Node.js
• Express
• MongoDB (Mongoose)
• shortid (for generating short IDs)

---

⚙️ Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Node.js (v16+ recommended)
• MongoDB (local or remote)

Install

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/AK-RoXX/URL-Shortener-using-NodeJS-and-Mongo.git
cd url-shortener

2. Install dependencies

npm install

3. Start the server

npm start

By default the server listens on port 8001 and connects to a local MongoDB instance at mongodb://localhost:27017/url-shortener (see index.js). You can modify the connection URL or port directly in index.js, or extend the project to read configuration from environment variables.

---

🚀 API

Base path: http://localhost:8001

Create a short URL

• Endpoint: POST /url
• Request body (JSON):

{ "url": "https://example.com/some/long/path" }

• Response:

{ "id": "shortId" }

Example using curl:

curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"url":"https://example.com"}' http://localhost:8001/url

Get analytics for a short URL

• Endpoint: GET /url/analytics/:shortId
• Response:

{
  "totalClicks": 5,
  "analytics": [{"timestamp": 1650000000000}, ...]
}

Example:

curl http://localhost:8001/url/analytics/abcd12

Redirect (follow short link)

• Endpoint: GET /:shortId
• Behavior: redirects to the original URL and adds a visit entry with a timestamp to the visitHistory array.

Example:

# In the browser visit http://localhost:8001/abcd12
curl -v http://localhost:8001/abcd12

---

🗂 Data model

The URL model (in models/url.js) has the following structure:

• shortId (String, required, unique)
• redirectUrl (String, required)
• visitHistory (Array of objects { timestamp: Number })
• createdAt, updatedAt (timestamps generated by Mongoose)

---