Build your own URL shortener service with Netlify

— 1 minute read

RACE.TW uses GitHub and Netlify as a URL shortener for personal use. The method is to use Netlify's _redirects file to do the redirection, please refer to “Redirects and rewrites - Netlify Docs” for more details.

Procedure

  1. Buy a domain name, the shorter name is better.
  2. Create a new repository on GitHub and add a _redirects file with the following content:
# Redirect with a 301
/FH4        https://store.steampowered.com/app/1293830/Forza_Horizon_4/
  1. Go to Netlify to create a new website, connect to the GitHub repository, set the DNS binding domain name, and wait until the website is automatically built and deployed.

Generally, a single _redirects file is all that's needed for a site to be able to redirect, but you can refer to “netlify-shortener” to build it.

So for this example, when you go to https://race.tw/FH4, it redirects you to https://store.steampowered.com/app/1293830/Forza_Horizon_4/.