Dev Journal #8: I dub thee shorty

So far, I’ve been referring to this project as just URL Shortener, which doesn’t do it justice. If I’m creating the Next Web Scale Startup™, I need a cool and flashy name for this project.

I spent a few hours poking at possible domain names in AWS Route 53, but it was tough to use. Every search would take a few seconds, none of my ideas were able to be purchased, and Route 53 even started recommending me domains that I had already searched for that were previously listed as unavailable.

I realized that since my plan is to host on link.nickymarino.com eventually, I don’t need a custom domain. I can just use Route 53 as the DNS service for the subdomain and import the custom domain in SST without worrying about migrating the parent domain nickymarino.com away from Hover¹.

So! Unconstrained by the fickle beast of whatever domains are up for grabs and don’t cost $300/month, without further ado, we’ll be doing business here as shorty.

Updating the code with the new name is pretty trivial. We’ll change the name formally in package.json:

{
  "name": "shorty",
  // ...

As well as in sst.config.ts:

export default {
  config(_input) {
    return {
      name: "shorty",
      region: "us-east-1",
    };
  },
  stacks(app) {
    app.stack(Database);
    app.stack(API);
    app.stack(Site);
  },
} satisfies SSTConfig;

And then we’ll need to update each of the sub-module package.json files, such as in packages/core/package.json:

{
  "name": "@shorty/core",
  // ...

Each import statement needs to be updated too, such as in packages/functions/src/redirect.ts:

import { Link } from "@shorty/core/link";

// ...

This was super straightforward using VSCode’s project-wide find and replace. However, because the name of the app changed, SST deploys my stack as test-shorty (in STAGE-APPNAME format) instead of test-cow-link². To sanity check, let’s re-populate the DB with some links and load the UI to make sure it’s all connected:

And it works! You can view the code on the Rename project to shorty PR.