FAQ

What is this project about?

Answer

It's a project that shows how to create a Vanity URL shortening Service using just AWS S3 Static Website Hosting and Route 53 with no other dependencies.

What scripting language does this use?

Answer

This project was built using Terraform 1x in IntelliJ IDEA with the Terraform plugin. It also includes CLI scripts written in Batch and Bash to manage the vanity URL shortening service more easily from Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Seeing weird characters or dark colors in the output?

Answer

If using git bash on Windows, there may be characters like [1m←[34m.....←[0m displayed. For other shells and or operating systems, the colors being used in some of the outputs may be too dark to read. In both cases, the cause relates to the use of colors in the console. AWS CLI doesn't currently offer a way to permanently disable this in their tool. However, one workaround is to add alias aws='aws --color off' to ~/.bashrc and running the command source ~/.bashrc to automatically add the color disable flag. Alternatively, the script can be modified directly to add the --color off flag to each AWS CLI command used.

Reference: https://github.com/aws/aws-cli/issues/1422

Getting command not recognized/found with certain URLs when creating a new shortlink?

Answer

When getting command not recognized/found with certain URLs during the creation of a new shortlink, make sure to quote the URL. Quoting the URL is usually not required except when the URL contains certain special characters like the Ampersand &.