This is a quick and practical proof of concept of a “free” link redirection service, hosted on Netlify. I am using one of my domains to redirect to various URLs, to my own projects. The setup is simple and can be done in a matter of minutes.

Step 1: add your redirects in quicklinks/_redirects. The accepted format is documented at Netlify. For more complicated cases add your rules to netlify.toml.

For example:

1# general links
2
3/             https://github.com/davidsneighbour/hugo-modules/
4/log          https://github.com/davidsneighbour/namespace/blob/main/hugo/logging-system.md

Step 2: create a netlify.toml that defines the folder quicklinks to be deployed as live site.

1[build]
2  publish = 'quicklinks/'

1build:
2  publish: quicklinks/

1{
2   "build": {
3      "publish": "quicklinks/"
4   }
5}

Step 3: add your repository to your Netlify organisation and deploy.

Step 4: add a custom domain or make your Netlify sub-domain look nice by renaming it to something other than very-random-string.netlify.app under “Site Configuration” > “Change site name”.

Then use your redirects.

I connected my tool-domain dnbhub.xyz to a quick setup of URLs for my projects and you can test it by any arbitrary redirection from this setup file (I admit it’s not widely used yet). For example https://dnbhub.xyz sends you right to my GoHugo module repository and https://dnbhub.xyz/hooks sends you to the landing page for my hooks module.

The initial advantage of having shorter URLs is topped by your ability to change endpoints by just re-deploying a new version of your site instead of having to go through all places where you mentioned this URL. This is a great way to have a “free” URL shortening service for your own projects.