GET – StartJS

URL shorteners are very useful. Remembering long and tedious URL addresses, or sharing 100 character URLs with your peers is not what we would call, convenient. That’s why we have services such as the Google URL Shortener, Bitly or TinyURL.

We are going to replicate the functionality that these pages offer to some extent. We’ll start off by creating an API using Node.js and the Express framework, and will integrate with a MongoDB instance to store information making use of Mongoose.

The functionality is quite straightforward, we must implement two endpoints in our application:

/new/URL_TO_SHORTEN: Creates a new short URL for the provided long URL.
/SHORT_URL: Will redirect to the long version of the provided short URL.

Instead of babbling around, let’s set up the project and install all of our dependencies.

This time around, we are going to be coding our own timestamp microservice using Node.js, and then, deploy it to Heroku. It’s going to be a very simple service that will return the unix time and natural date for the received input. Our API should be able to receive and properly handle the following two formats:

A unix timestamp is a metric used to track time by displaying the miliseconds (sometimes seconds) that have passed since January 1st, 1970 at 00:00:00 UTC. For a quick test, you can get the unix timestamp for right now, by going into the Chrome DevTools console and typing the following: Date.now();
The natural language date means that the date is passed in the following format: October 1, 2016.

Our timestamp microservice will accept any one of these two formats, and then, return a JSON object containing both formats. In other words:

If the API receives this: 1477388794872, it will output the following JSON object:
```
{
  "unix": 1477388794872,
  "natural": "October 25, 2016"
}
```
Receiving “October 25, 2016” will output the same exact JSON object.

If no unix timestamp nor natural date is present, we’ll return null for both fields:

{
  "unix": null,
  "natural": null
}

Tag: GET

Create a URL Shortener with Node.js and MongoDB

Create a Timestamp microservice with Node.js