# Golink
The Golink crate is an engine for resolving URLs for link shortening services.
You provide a link to expand and a function for mapping short URLs to long URLs,
and this crate will:
- **Normalize your input to ignore case and hyphenation**: `http://go/My-Service`
and `http://go/myservice` are treated as the same input into your mapping function
- **Append secondary paths to your resolved URL**: if your mapping function returns
`http://example.com` for the given shortlink `foo`, then a request to `http://go/foo/bar/baz`
will resolve to `http://example.com/foo/bar/baz`
- **Apply templating, when applicable**: Using a simple templating language, your long URLs
can powerfully place remaining path segments in your URL ad-hoc and provide a fallback
value when there are no remaining path segments. For example, if your mapping function
returns for the given shortlink `prs` the following URL:
```text
https://github.com/pulls?q=is:open+is:pr+review-requested:{{ if path }}{ path }{{ else }}@me{{ endif }}+archived:false
```
then a request to `http://go/prs` returns the URL to all Github PRs to which
you are assigned:
```text
https://github.com/pulls?q=is:open+is:pr+review-requested:@me+archived:false
```
and a request to `http://go/prs/jameslittle230` returns the URL to all
Github PRs to which I ([@jameslittle230](https://github.com/jameslittle230))
am assigned:
```text
https://github.com/pulls?q=is:open+is:pr+review-requested:jameslittle230+archived:false
```
This resolver performs all the functionality described in [Tailscale's Golink
project](https://tailscale.com/blog/golink/)
This crate doesn't provide a web service or an interface for creating shortened links;
it only provides an algorithm for resolving short URLs to long URLs.
## Usage
The Golink crate doesn't care how you store or retrieve long URLs given a short URL;
you can store them in memory, in a database, or on disk, as long as they are retrievable
from within a closure you pass into the `resolve()` function:
```rust
fn lookup(input: &str) -> Option<String> {
if input == "foo" {
return Some("http://example.com".to_string());
}
None
}
let resolved = golink::resolve("http://go/foo", &lookup)
match computed {
Ok(GolinkResolution::RedirectRequest(url)) => {
// Redirect to `url`
}
Ok(GolinkResolution::MetadataRequest(key)) => {
// `key` is the original shortlink.
// Return JSON that displays metadata/analytics about `key`
}
Err(e) => {
// Return a 400 error to the user, with a message based on `e`
}
}
```