express-redirect

Tiny Express app built for a bootcamp segment on REST APIs: one dynamic GET route resolves short slugs from JSON and responds with an HTTP redirect—enough to show routing, handlers, status codes, and a read from the filesystem.

Stack

• Node 20+, Express 5, TypeScript
• Slugs and targets live in data.json; redirect counts in counter.json (both can live under DATA_DIR if set)

Run locally

npm install
npm run dev          # tsx watch — http://localhost:3000
# or
npm run build && npm start

PORT defaults to 3000. Production hosts (e.g. Railway) set PORT for you.

Routes

Method	Path	Behavior
GET	/health	200 + plain ok
GET	/analytics	Simple HTML table of hit counts per slug
GET	/analytics.json	Same counts as JSON
GET	/:slug	302 to URL from data.json, or 404

Named routes are registered before /:slug so paths like /analytics are not treated as slugs.

Data

• data.json — map of slug → destination URL (committed example; adjust as needed).
• counter.json — auto-updated hit counts (in repo as a starter; on PaaS use a volume + DATA_DIR if counts must survive redeploys).

Deploy

Configured for Railway via railway.toml (Nixpacks: npm run build, then npm start). Set DATA_DIR to a mounted volume path if you want durable data.json / counter.json.