amilegit.link

Hide an innocent link behind a malicious looking URL

How it works

amilegit is the antithesis of a URL shortnener. Instead of making links short, it transforms them into a form that appears malicious.

See this YouTube video for a brief(-ish) overview:

The project is comprised of two halves: a Vue.js frontend, and serverless backend. Everything is written in TypeScript, and has relevant unit tests implemented.

In production, the backend is running on AWS Lambda, and the frontend is served from an S3 bucket. DynamoDB is used as the backing database for the server-side. Since this is a major dependency, some additional work would be required to run the project anywhere other than AWS. That's not to say its impossible, though!

Getting it running locally

Pre-requisites

You will need the following installed:

• node.js 12.x (or newer)
• yarn
• Java Runtime Engine (JRE) version 6.x or newer (for local database)

If you don't have a good text editor, Visual Studio Code is excellent (and is free!).

Getting setup

To download a copy of this repository, in your favourite command-line interface:

$ git clone https://github.com/Matchstic-Project/amilegit.link.git
$ cd amilegit.link

Running the server

First, we'll get the server running.

$ cd server
$ yarn install
$ sls dynamodb install
$ yarn local

This will start the server-side on port 8081, ready to accept connections from the frontend.

Running the frontend

It's recommended to open a new command-line window to keep the server running!

Assuming you open the window inside the main amilegit.link folder:

$ cd client
$ yarn install
$ yarn serve

The client will now be running on port 8080. You can now head over to http://localhost:8080 in your browser to see it running.

[optional] Deploying to AWS

The project is setup so you can deploy it to your own AWS account. There are a few tweaks you need to make, though.

You will also need the following:

• AWS CLI
• IAM user for deployment

For the latter, you should follow this guide. It'll be assumed you have a profile created named serverless-admin as recommended there.

The deployment process is two parts for now. I think there's a couple of steps missing however, so you may need to get creative to hook everything up right.

Server deployment

To deploy the server, first, you need to update server/components/domains.json to only include the domain you want to point at your server. e.g., if you own blahblah.com, the JSON file will look like this:

{
    "items": [
        "blahblah.com"
    ]
}

Now, you can deploy the code:

$ cd server
$ yarn deploy

That will create the relevant lambda functions, API gateway and DynamoDB tables the codebase requires at AWS for you.

Client deployment

This part is 💩. Deploying the client is a little bit (!!) more involved than it should really be.

First, you should update client/src/lib/network.ts on line 10. Replace https://api.amilegit.link to point at your deployed server.

Now, head over to AWS. You need to create a bucket for the frontend to be deployed into, and to be configured for web hosting. See here for Amazon's documentation.

Next, you need to set environment variables to point at an S3 bucket used for deployment.

$ cp env.sample .env
$ nano .env

You need to fill in the name of your S3 bucket here, as well as setting the right IAM user profile, if it is different to serverless-admin as above.

Now, you should be able to run:

$ yarn deploy:s3

Licensing

amilegit.link is licensed under the GPLv3. I also ask that you also don't make commerical derivatives of it.