Hosting My Own Short URLs With YOURLS and Docker
I’ve always wanted to self-host a short URL service. Mainly because sometimes you need to hand out links, and links expire. (Unless you manage to cheat entropy and the decay of the universe.) So if I have my own short URL service, I can hand out what is essentially a permalink, because I can update it until the heat death of the universe or when my server shuts down because I forgot to pay the bill on time, whichever is faster.
Anyway, I set it up with YOURLS and Docker (+ Docker Compose). I thought it was going to be difficult, but it’s literally this file:
docker-compose.yml:
version: "3"
services:
mariadb:
image: mariadb:11
container_name: yourls-mariadb
restart: unless-stopped
environment:
MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: ROOT_PASSWORD_HERE
MYSQL_PASSWORD: DATABASE_PASSWORD_HERE
MYSQL_DATABASE: yourls
MYSQL_USER: yourls
volumes:
- ./mariadb:/var/lib/mysql
yourls:
image: yourls:latest
container_name: yourls-app
restart: unless-stopped
depends_on:
- mariadb
environment:
YOURLS_DB_HOST: mariadb
YOURLS_DB_USER: yourls
YOURLS_DB_PASS: DATABASE_PASSWORD_HERE
YOURLS_DB_NAME: yourls
YOURLS_USER: ADMIN_USERNAME_HERE
YOURLS_PASS: ADMIN_PASSWORD_HERE
YOURLS_SITE: "https://yourls.example.com"
YOURLS_UNIQUE_URLS: "true"
YOURLS_PRIVATE: "true"
volumes:
- ./yourls:/var/www/html/user
swag:
image: linuxserver/swag:latest
container_name: swag
restart: unless-stopped
environment:
- PUID=1000
- PGID=1000
- TZ=Etc/UTC
- URL=yourls.example.com
- VALIDATION=http
- EMAIL=letsencrypt-email@example.com
volumes:
- ./swag/config:/config
ports:
- "80:80"
- "443:443"
depends_on:
- yourls
Once you have it up and running with docker-compose up -d, you do need to move the sample configuration file in the swag/ folder and adjust some settings, but that’s not too difficult.
Here’s a short link back to this blog post: https://links.ericswpark.com/blog-yourls (so meta!)