Your(ls) Own Short URL service on Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi a $35 credit-card sized computer is an excellent piece of hardware that can be used to run many of small workloads for personal use, learning and sometimes even for use at SMBs and Enterprises.

Yourls (Your Own URL Shortener) is a small PHP application which uses MySQL as DB to run our own URL shortening service similar to well known bit.ly and tinyurl.com

I Have been running Yourls on Ubuntu VM on Hyper-V with Apache HTTPD for an year now.

After getting Raspberry Pi wanted to shift Yourls to Raspberry Pi and due to limited resources available on RPi I chose NGINX webserver instead of Apache webserver to run Yourls.

This post is a walkthrough of working configuration to setup Yourls under 10 minutes on Raspberry Pi running NGINX webserver, PHP and MySQL.

My Setup – Hardware and Software details

1. Raspberry Pi Model B (512 MB RAM) connected to LAN

2. 4 GB Class 4 SD Card

3. PiBang Linux Server Edition

4. Windows 8.1 Laptop with Wifi

5. Putty

6. Win32 Disk Image

7. Cisco E1200 Wifi Router

8. Cable Broadband – 5 Mbps

Note - I assume you are using Raspbian or some derivative like Pibang and know how to setup Raspberry Pi to connect using ssh, If not references to help are available at the end of this post.

Step – 1: Prepare Raspberry Pi

Burn your distro to SD card, boot Raspberry Pi and finish initial configuration

Step – 2: Install required packages

Connect to your Raspberry Pi using SSH and issue below commands to install all the needed prerequisites

apt-get update && apt-get -y upgrade && apt-get -y install mysql-server mysql-client nginx php5 php5-mysql php5-fpm php-apc chkconfig

This would look for updates and upgrade all the existing packages of the distro and install below components along with dependencies

1. NGINX webserver
2. PHP 5
3. MySQL Database server

During installation we need provide password for MySQL root to complete the installation

Step – 3: Configure MySQL DB

mysql –u root –p

password: ENTER-ROOT-PASSWORD-PROVIDED-IN-STEP-2

Create Database

create database yourlsdb;

Create User for Yourls

create user 'yourlsdbuser'@'localhost' identified BY 'YOUR-PASSWORD-HERE';

Grant Permissions for above created user on the database

grant all on yourlsdb.* TO yourlsdbuser@localhost;

Exit

Step – 4: Configure NGINX webserver

We first need to create a directory to which would be the root directory for Yourls

mkdir /var/www

Unlink default site in NGINX

unlink /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

Create NGINX config file for Yourls

vi /etc/nginx/sites-available/yourls

Add below entries to newly created config file above, save and exit

server {
        listen 80;
        root /var/www;
        index index.php index.html index.htm;

        location / {
              try_files $uri $uri/ /yourls-loader.php;
              location ~ \.php$ {
              fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
              fastcgi_index index.php;
              fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
              include        fastcgi_params;
              }
         }

}

Create links to yourls config file

cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
ln -s ../sites-available/yourls

Step – 5: Download and Prepare Yourls for Installation

Download the latest (1.6 while writing this post) Yourls zip archive from git here

cd /var/www
wget https://github.com/YOURLS/YOURLS/archive/1.6.zip

Unzip the archive and copy appropriate files to required folders

unzip 1.6.zip
cp -r YOURLS-1.6/* .
rm -r YOURLS-1.6
cp user/config-sample.php user/config.php

Open config.php

vi user/config.php

Provide details for MySQL DB connectivity

/** MySQL database username */
define( 'YOURLS_DB_USER', 'yourlsdbuser' );

/** MySQL database password */
define( 'YOURLS_DB_PASS', 'Passw0rd$123' );

/** The name of the database for YOURLS */
define( 'YOURLS_DB_NAME', 'yourlsdb' );

/** MySQL hostname */
define( 'YOURLS_DB_HOST', 'localhost' );