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Get ready for Firefly 0.3!

·227 words·2 mins· ·
Ariejan de Vroom
Author
Ariejan de Vroom
Jack of all Trades, Professional Software Craftsman
Table of Contents

Hot off the press is Firefly 0.3! Firefly is a simple URL shortener application intended for personal use. It’s core features are:

  • Very light-weight - based on Sinatra
  • Shorten URLs using 62-Base encoding
  • Offers an easy to use API
  • Keeps track of URL clicks
  • Supports most popular database backends, including MySQL and Sqlite3
  • Includes a ready-to-use Bookmarklet
  • Works with any Rack capable web server

Interested? Give it a go! Here’s how in ht

1. Install Firefly
#

gem install firefly

2. Ready?
#

Create a new directory and place the following config.ru file in it:

require 'rubygems'
require 'firefly'

disable :run

app = Firefly::Server.new do
  set :hostname,    "localhost:3000"
  set :api_key,     "test"
  set :database,    "sqlite3://#{Dir.pwd}/firefly.sqlite3"
end

run app

3. Go!
#

Start your engines! In this case I use thin:

thin start -R config.ru

Now, when you visit http://localhost:3000/ you’ll be asked for your API key to login. Then, start shortening!

Updating
#

If you were already running Firefly 0.2, upgrading is easy. Simple update the Firefly gem to 0.3 and restart your server.

When you update from 0.2 you’ll notice your click stats are all indicating 0. Don’t worry, no data was lost! The solution is quite simple.

  1. Remove the clicks field from firefly_urls
ALTER TABLE `firefly_urls` DROP `clicks`;
  1. Rename the visits field to clicks
ALTER TABLE `firefly_urls` CHANGE `visits` `clicks` int;

All done! No restart required.