Generator to create your own personal url shortener to deploy to Vercel (formerly Zeit Now).

• Getting Started
• Installation
• Usage
• After you generate
• Related Projects

These aren't prerequisites but before you're able to actually deploy your url shortener you should:

1. Create a Vercel account.
2. Set up Vercel GitHub Integration. This way Vercel deploys automatically for you.
3. Buy, migrate or simply point a domain you already own to Vercel's dns.

You don't technically need to have a domain. By default your new project in Vercel will be deployed with a domain like https://my-url-shortener.vercel.app, and your redirects will work just fine. However part of the glory of url shorteners is that they create short urls that are easy to type and remember!

npm install -g yo generator-vercel-shortener

yo vercel-shortener

By default it will look to generate in your current working directory. If that's not what you want, then specify the directory in the call or create a new directory to run the generator in.

yo vercel-shortener [<project-directory>]

or...

mkdir <project-directory>
cd <project-directory>
yo vercel-shortener

Next steps after generating:

1. Create a repository for your url shortener, https://github.com/new.
2. Run git remote add origin <repo_url>.
3. Run git push origin main.
4. Run git branch -u origin/main.
5. Run vercel to setup & deploy your project to Vercel.
6. Add redirects:
   • Run shorten <destination> [<source>]. The generator will expose a globally available script for you. Run this from anywhere in your terminal. See vercel-redirects for the full cli documentation.
   • Run npm run shorten <destination> [<source>] from the root of the project.
   • Add them in vercel.json manually. You'll need to commit and push them yourself.

For example:

shorten https://gist.github.com/codfish/91ef26f3a56a5c5ca0912aa8c0c5c020 /linting

And in about ~5 seconds I can hit codfi.sh/linting and it will redirect for me.

• codfi.sh - My own personal url shortener, using the same configuration as a project built with this generator.
• vercel-redirects - Command-line utility to manage your Vercel project redirects.
• netlify-shortener - Your own free URL shortener with Netlify (different serverless platform).