Setup your own Firefly URL shortener in 2.5 minutes

By popular demand I’ve setup a guide to setup your own personal URL shortener with Firefly and Heroku. I’ve timed it an you can do it in under 2.5 minutes. How’s that for fast?

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I’m going to assume that you have git installed on your computer and that you have an already working Heroku account. If not, sign up here for Heroku first.

I’ll be referencing to a my_firefly_dir in this guide. You can just pick a name during step 2 and it will be created for you.

1. gem install heroku
2. git clone git://github.com/ariejan/firefly-heroku.git my_firefly_dir
3. cd my_firefly_dir
4. heroku create
5. Use the URL returned by heroku create and use the FQDN (xxxx.heroku.com) to configure the hostname in config.ru. Like: set :hostname, 'xxxx.heroku.com'
6. Change the API key in config.ru to something more secure.
7. Commit your changes with git commit -am 'Updated hostname and apikey'
8. git push heroku master
9. Done! Open your app with heroku open

So, there’s no excuse not to try Firefly now! Use the included bookmarklet to quickly shorten URLs from your browser or use the firefly-client gem to enable shortening in your own application!

Please, let me know if you did a succesfull install of Firefly and what you think about it.