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Tidylnk

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A self-hosted URL shortener with a React admin panel, built with Go, Redis, and PostgreSQL.

Code Live
tech = [Go, React, Redis, PostgreSQL, Docker]
updated =
Developer Tools Backend #Go #React #Redis #PostgreSQL #Docker #Railway #Caching

Tidylnk is a URL shortener I built to have a simple, self-hosted alternative to the usual third-party link shorteners, with an admin panel to manage and track links.

Tech stack

  • Backend: two separate Go services sharing one codebase, an admin API for account and link management, and a redirect service that resolves short links and records clicks. Postgres and Redis sit on a private network that only those two services can reach, not even published Docker ports.
  • Frontend: a React admin panel (separate repo , Vite, TypeScript, shadcn/ui) for creating, organizing, and tracking shortened links, generating QR codes for them, and managing the account.
  • Storage: PostgreSQL as the primary datastore for link records, with Redis on the redirect hot path for fast lookups.
  • Deployment: backend and database containerized with Docker and deployed on Railway.

Decisions worth noting

A real homepage instead of a bare 404

tidylnk.com itself used to return a plain JSON 404, which looks broken to a visitor and suspicious to anything scanning link reputation. It now serves a small static homepage with no JavaScript at all, linking out to the admin panel, both repos, and a way to report an abusive link, plus a robots.txt that lets crawlers index that homepage without following (and inflating the click count on) the short links themselves.

Clicks never block a redirect

Click recording writes happen in batches off the request path rather than inline with the redirect. If the database falls behind and the in-memory queue backs up past 10,000 pending clicks, further clicks are dropped and counted in the logs rather than slowing redirects down or blocking on a write. A redirect staying fast matters more than never losing a click.

A strict CSP without unsafe-eval

The admin panel runs Zod for form validation, which normally needs new Function() for its JIT-compiled parsers, incompatible with a CSP that doesn’t allow unsafe-eval. Running Zod in jitless mode gives up some validation throughput in exchange for a CSP with no unsafe-eval exception at all.

Why I built it

I wanted a link shortener I fully controlled, with no reliance on a third party’s uptime, rate limits, or analytics restrictions, and a project to exercise Go and Redis together on a workload where caching genuinely matters: redirect latency.

It’s also the link shortener behind other project links I share, including the TTS Study Assistant Chrome Web Store listing.