Show HN: Cortris – A Simple Url Shortener written in Go | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Cortris – A Simple Url Shortener written in Go

adalricus.nand.sh

6 pointsadalricus4 comments

Good job on getting your first project out there, there is a lot to be improved upon here.

First off, it's standard practice to listen for PORT over the environment variable. You can always set a default, I often do, but it should able to be overriden.

Second, you are opening and closing your DB on every request, it may not cause too much latency, but you should 'open' the database upon application start, then use a service to allow your controllers access to the DB. If the project was larger, I would recommend some abstraction so you can use different types of storage solutions and the controller doesn't need to have any idea what is used behind the scenes.

errChk will cause the entire application to crash on any 'err' thrown in it that isn't nil. Errors should be handled a bit more gracefully, a common pattern is:

    if err := datastore.Get(c, key, record); err != nil {
        http.Error(w, err.Error(), 500)
        return
    }

You are definitely on the right path though! If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment. I can create a PR later with the suggested updates if that would be of any interest to you.

Oh, also Heroku or Google Cloud Run may be of interest to you, both services have free tiers that you can get started on, but you will want to change your datasource to use something beyond sqlite.

> it's standard practice to listen for PORT over the environment variable

I didn't think of this, I was thinking of making something like config file where user can specify it. This will be a lot better than that, so I could ask users to set CORTRIS_PORT & read that?

edit: I'm now reading port from environment & setting it to 8080 if it doesn't exist.

> you are opening and closing your DB on every request

I don't understand about controllers part, could I open the db at start & put db.Close() at end of main (?), is there more I have to think of (like what happens after program fails & the connection is still open?)

> http.Error(w, err.Error(), 500)

Is it safe to pass the error to the user? Could something go wrong considering the source is already world readable?

It would be nice if anyone could set it up on heroku free tier, where do I learn about it?

I'm planning on getting a cheap vps to deploy my little projects. Thank you for looking at my project!

I've implemented these since then, I also read the database file from environment now.

It's nothing fancy, I'm learning how to write programs. This is one of my first projects. I don't have resources to deploy it on the web, the code is short & it really doesn't do much. Previously I used cgi for all my projects, decided to try this reverse-proxy thing this time.

Source Code: https://github.com/adalricus/cortris/

License: ISC License

Images: linked on the page

Reply on news.ycombinator.com