Snaplink — Short Links, Real Analytics

Snaplink is a complete, self-hosted alternative to commercial link shorteners — the same codebase serves the API, the redirect edge and the analytics dashboard. It is small enough to understand in one sitting and real enough to run for a community.

What it does

• Shorten any URL — 7-character slugs drawn from an ambiguity-free alphabet (no 0/O/1/l), collision-safe creation with automatic retry.
• Click analytics — per-link totals, top referrers, and a 14-day per-day histogram via a Prisma groupBy.
• Fast redirect path — /r/:slug records the visit best-effort and 302s immediately; analytics can never break a redirect.
• SQLite by default — zero setup; moving to Postgres is a one-line provider change.

curl -X POST localhost:3000/api/links \\
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \\
  -d '{"url":"https://github.com/Godde3s"}'
# {"link":{"slug":"k7mp2ax", ...}}

curl -I localhost:3000/r/k7mp2ax              # 302 + visit recorded
curl localhost:3000/api/links/k7mp2ax/stats   # totals, byDay, topReferrers

Engineering notes

The redirect handler is deliberately boring: look up the slug, wrap analytics in its own try/catch, redirect. URL validation rejects anything that is not an absolute http(s) URL with a real hostname before the database ever sees it — javascript: and friends die at the door. The UI is Tailwind, dark, keyboard-friendly. Unit tests cover validation, slug generation (200-sample alphabet check) and referrer bucketing; CI runs vitest + tsc --noEmit on every push. MIT licensed.