Shortlinks With Shlink

YOUR SHORTLINKS SERVER

Let’s see how to set up your own shortlink server on Debian 11 using shlink , which has many features, multi domain, QR codes, emojis, REST API, Bot detection,….

The first thing is to install php 8.1 or 8.2 with the necessary modules, as indicated in the official documentation.

INSTALLING PHP 8.1 ON DEBIAN 11

We execute:

apt install -y lsb-release ca-certificates apt-transport-https software-properties-common gnupg2

echo “deb https://packages.sury.org/php/ $(lsb_release -sc) main” | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sury-php.list

curl -fsSL https://packages.sury.org/php/apt.gpg| gpg –dearmor -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/sury-keyring.gpg

apt-get update

We have added the repositories and then installed the necessary modules.

apt-get install php-apcu php8.1 php8.1-fpm php8.1-mysql php8.1-gd php8.1-common php8.1-curl php8.1-intl php8.1-gmp php8.1-xml php-dev php-pear

We can check with:

php –modules

That they are loaded correctly.

SHLINK INSTALLATION AND CONFIGURATION

We start by installing the necessary packages.

apt-get install nginx mariadb-server unzip sudo

We created the database.

mysql

Once inside we write.

CREATE DATABASE shlink;
GRANT ALL ON shlink.* TO ‘shlink’@’localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘password’;
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
EXIT;

You can call the database whatever you like, just like the user.

Once we have the database, we proceed with the download and installation of the latest shlink version.

wget https://github.com/shlinkio/shlink/releases/download/v3.5.4/shlink3.5.4_php8.1_dist.zip

unzip shlink3.5.4_php8.1_dist.zip

mv shlink3.5.4_php8.1_dist /var/www/html/shlink

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/shlink/

chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/shlink/

cd /var/www/html/shlink

(If you do not go to this directory, the following command will not be able to write the configuration file if we execute it with the full path /var/www/htmtl…., since the path in the script is config/params to save the configuration file)

sudo -u www-data php8.1 vendor/bin/shlink-installer install

And we will get an interactive menu

DATABASE (the data of the connection to our database)

We choose 1 in our case and it will ask us for the following data

URL SHORTENER

1. The default domain to generate the short URLs

2. With or without SSL

3. How many characters

4. If you want it to resolve based on the long URL

5. If you want it to resolve the URL as soon as possible and add the rest of the long URL

6. If you want it to support multilevel

7. If you want it to consider the same URL with or without a trailing slash

8. How you want them to match

9. GeoLite2 License.

Here we stop a bit to explain. Shlink uses GeoLite2 to geolocate the visits, if it is not entered it simply will not geolocate them. Obtaining this license is free, you just have to:

Create an account in MAXMIND https://www.maxmind.com/en/geolite2/signup

And then generate the key

After that, it asks us what type of redirection we want, choose the best one for your case.

And how long we want them to be cached in seconds, by default 30

TRACKING

To keep the post short, I’ll simply answer the questions about what you want to track and if you want to exclude something like an IP range, a browser, etc.

REDIRECTS

Where you want to redirect according to what they ask you, it has to be in http:// or https:// format

QR CODES

How do you want the QR codes to be?

APPLICATION

There is no mystery, except perhaps the first one which means if that link will be indefinite or you can say 1, then it will be deleted after the first opening.

INTEGRATIONS

Since we are not setting up a cluster we will say no.

Once completed we will find our configuration file in /var/www/html/shlink/config/params with the name generated_config.php, which we can modify if we change our mind about the options selected during the installation.

WE CONTINUE WITH NGINX

We deleted the default site

rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

And now we create our site

nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/tudominio.conf

Adding the following

server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
server_name tudominio.com;

root /var/www/html/shlink/public;
error_log /var/log/nginx/shlink.error;
access_log /var/log/nginx/shlink.access;

index index.php index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;

location / {
# try to serve file directly, fallback to app.php
try_files $uri /index.php$is_args$args;
}

# redirect some entire folders
rewrite ^/(vendor|translations|build)/.* /index.php break;

location ~ \.php$ {
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php8.1-fpm.sock;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
}

}

We create the symbolic link to activate it

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/tudominio.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

We check that there are no errors in the configuration

nginx -t

And we recharge it

systemctl reload nginx

Now we will enable SSL since in our config we have said SSL

apt-get install certbot python3-certbot-nginx

certbot –nginx –agree-tos –redirect –hsts –staple-ocsp –email tumail@example.com -d tudominio.com

Once all this is done, we only need to generate our API key

sudo -u www-data php8.1 /var/www/html/shlink/bin/cli api-key:generate

And we go to https://app.shlink.io/ to add our server if we want the graphical interface

Or from the server itself using

sudo -u www-data php8.1 /var/www/html/shlink/bin/cli short-url:create

NOTE!!! Always provide the https://

We can see the options with:

sudo -u www-data php8.1 /var/www/html/shlink/bin/cli

You can find the API documentation at https://shlink.io/documentation/api-docs/

And finally, to get the QR code, you just have to add /qr-code to the short URL.

TL.