• Create a URL shortening service
• Put it behind a cherrypy Rest API in a meaningful way
• The service must be built as a Docker image
• Put the code in Github in a way that makes sense: Readme file, etc Make it pretty as if someone's going to use it
• deploy to a cloud provider of your choice
• rate limit the service to 2 requests per second
• bonus: for any kind of GUI

This project builds a deployable docker image containing the URL shortening service running on port 8080.

A service needs to be fault tolerant and horizontally scaleable. I envision that when deployed to a production setting that many instances of this docker container will sit behind a load balancer such as HAProxy. I feel the rate limiting belongs at the front door to the service where we can rate limit across all running instances. I have utilized NGINX within the vagrant built machine to simulate HAProxy and handle the rate limiting.

By installing vagrant with the vagrant-aws plugin and setting your custom values in the Vagrantfile and machines.d/ShortUrl.rb you can actually build an instance in your AWS instance.

• Create a shortened URL

  • POST request to the URL with a form encoded parameter named url and the system will return the shortened URL you can use.

    • Example: curl -X POST -d 'url=http://google.com' http://localhost/

    • Example success response: code: 201 body: http://localhost/fg5

    • Returns a status code of 500 on any error creating the URL

• Delete a shortened URL

  • DELETE request to the shortened URL
    • Example: curl -X DELETE http://localhost/fg5
    • Always returns a 204 status code and an empty body

• Install pip using your package manager
• pip install virtualenv
• pip install virtualenvwrapper
• mkdir ~/.virtualenvs
• Add the following to your .bashrc
  export WORKON_HOME=~/.virtualenvs/
  export PIP_VIRTUALENV_BASE=$WORKON_HOME
  source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh
• source ~/.bashrc
• mkvirtualenv shortUrl
• workon shortUrl
• pip install -r requirements.txt
• configure git to ignore all compiled python files
  • In .git/info/exclude add *.pyc
• install virtualbox via your package manager
• download vagrant v 1.7.4 for your OS and install
• vagrant plugin install vagrant-aws

• Intialize database
  • python initalize.py
• python run.py
  • This will not include rate limiting

• nosetests
• If you want to see the stdout during test runs: nosetests -s
• If you want to see coverage reports for the tests: nosetests --with-coverage --cover-package app --cover-html --cover-html-dir=/path/to/html/output

Advanced Rest Client for chrome