How to have your own url shortener with Polr

It is very fashionable to use services that shorten our links, mainly to make them easier to distribute, to keep personal statistics or simply to make money through the advertising offered by the link shorteners.

I particularly like to shorten my links to distribute them easily and above all to have personalized statistics on who accesses each of them, but nowadays it is difficult to get a service considered good or safe. For all this, I started the task of finding how to shorten my links without depending on third parties, in this way I learned Pol.

What is Polr?

Pol is a modern, open source, fast link shortener distributed under the license GPLv2 +. It is written in Php y LumenUsing MySQL as the primary database.

Pol allows you to host your own URL shortener, leave marks on your url and get control of your statistics, it is a very easy to use tool, with a modern and intuitive interface, in addition, this tool has a powerful API.

poly logo

How can we test Polr

We can access a Polr demo where we can view and test its functionalities, for this we need the use of the following credentials:

Username: demo-admin
Password: demo-admin

Polr Demo

How to install Polr

Polr Requirements

The following software is required to enjoy Polr.

Apache, nginx, IIS or lighttpd
PHP> = 5.5.9
MariaDB or MySQL> = 5.5
Composer (Optional)
PHP requirement:
- OpenSSL PHP Extension
- PDO PHP Extension
- PDO MySQL Driver (php5-mysql on Debian & Ubuntu, php5x-pdo_mysql on FreeBSD)
- mbstring PHP Extension
- Tokenizer PHP Extension
- JSON PHP Extension

Downloading the Polr source code

We can download the latest stable version of Polr .

$ sudo su
# Cambiar al directorio de Polr
$ cd /var/www
# clone Polr
$ git clone https://github.com/cydrobolt/polr.git
# Dar permisos a Polr
$ chmod -R 755 polr

$ # git checkout <tag>

# Ejecutar sólo en distribuciones basadas en ubuntu
$ chown -R www-data polr
# Ejecutar sólo en distribuciones basadas en Fedora
$ chown -R apache polr
$ chcon -R -t httpd_sys_rw_content_t polr/storage polr/.env

Installing Polr using composer

# descargar el paquete composer 
curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
# Actualizar / instalar dependencias
php composer.phar install --no-dev -o

How to get started with the Polr API

We can start using the Polr API From its official site, it is a fairly intuitive API that will allow us to integrate the services it offers in our applications, or simply be able to access it from any services.

Conclusions about Polr

Pol Without a doubt, it is a tool that gives you security when it comes to shortening your links, it has an intuitive interface and can be the basis for you to create your own project with link shorteners. Being open source you can make the necessary improvements and changes, it has a clean code and I think it can be a tool that some of our readers could monetize in the future.

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