rustlinks

a work-in-progress Rust implementation of golinks

the idea

adding additional network hops to resolve link aliases at the scale that most companies use them is unnecessary, and in a remote/global workforce can be a significant source of latency depending on where those servers reside.

instead, we can synchronize changes in the background, and resolve links locally, without the need for waiting on network requests.

features

• links synchronized and stored locally
• oidc client
• browser ui
• metrics
• traces
• tls
  • single cert
  • sni (see: https://stephanheijl.com/rustls_sni.html)
• search index
• automatic link pruning
  • prunes links which return 404s
  • prunes links which haven't been used in a while

development

clone repository and submodules

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/tbrockman/rustlinks

build

cargo build

run

# start etcd, otel collector, clickhouse, and grafana
docker compose up -d
# start the rustlinks server locally
cargo run -- start

tls

install mkcert (if you don't already have a certificate authority)

mkcert -install
mkcert -key-file key.pem -cert-file cert.pem rs # [...and any other hostnames]
cargo run -- start --cert-file cert.pem --key-file key.pem --port 443

architecture

• an entry in /etc/hosts to direct requests to https://rs to the locally running rustlinks server
• a local CA to provide valid certificates for the above
• an actix-web-based Rust application, maintaining an in-memory set of links and shortened aliases (persisted to disk on modifications) by watching a namespace in etcd
• open-telemetry OTLP formatted metrics and traces, for analytics and observability
• clickhouse for storage of metrics + traces
• grafana for visualization of metrics + traces

todo

• tests: CLI, unit, and integration tests
• a React UI for CRUD'ing link aliases
• configurable URL fallback
• OAuth
• limit link storage (to not break etcd or unnecessarily store links which likely won't be used)
• distinguish readers vs. writers
  • writers manage the rustlinks etcd namespace (e.g. adds/removes links)
  • readers watch the rustlinks etcd namespace for changes
• make service/daemon installation simpler
• benchmarking/load test
  • what happens if we insert 100k aliases and then start the program
  • what happens if we insert 100k aliases while the program is running
• look into potentially replacing oidc clients in rust+ts (openidconnect and oidc-client-ts, respectively) (is the convenience worth the added deps?)