🔧 Build a self-hosted URL shortener with a dashboard
⚡ 6,073 views · 🔧 Miscellaneous
Description
This workflow creates an automatic self-hosted URL shortener. It consists of three sub-workflows:
- Short URL creation for extracting the provided long URL, generating an ID, and saving the record in the database. It returns a short link as a result.
- Redirection for extracting the ID value, validating the existence of its correspondent record in the database, and returning a redirection page after updating the visits (click) count.
- Dashboard for calculating simple statistics about the saved record and displaying them on a dashboard.
Read more about this use case and how to set up the workflow in the blog post How to build a low-code, self-hosted URL shortener in 3 steps.
Prerequisites
- A local proxy set up that redirects the n8n.ly domain to your n8n instance
- An Airtable account and credentials
- Basic knowledge of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS
Nodes
- Webhook nodes trigger the sub-workflows on calls to a specified link.
- IF nodes route the workflows based on specified query parameters.
- Set nodes set the required values returned by the previous nodes (id, longUrl, and shortUrl).
- Airtable nodes retrieve records (values) from or append records to the database.
- Function node calculates statistics on link clicks to be displayed on the dashboard, as well as its design.
- Crypto node generates a SHA256 hash.
🔗 Nodes Used
Airtable, Function, Start, Webhook
📥 Import
Download workflow.json and import into n8n:
Workflow menu → Import from File