Your own short links as an easily deployed static site on GitLab Pages

You're viewing a template repository tailored for deploying Suri to GitLab Pages with GitLab CI/CD. Head over to the main repository to learn more about Suri, including additional deployment options.

Setup: Step By Step

1. On GitLab, hit "Create new" > "New project/repository" in the upper-right corner, then "Import project" and "Repository by URL".
2. Enter https://github.com/surishortlink/suri-deploy-gitlab.git as the "Git repository URL". Choose the namespace, project name, and visibility level for your new project, then hit "Create project".
3. If your new project is private, go to its "Settings" and head to the "General" section. Expand "Visibility, project features, permissions", change "Pages" to "Everyone", and hit "Save changes". Otherwise, only members of your project can see your site.
4. Go to "Build" > "Pipelines" of your new project and hit "New pipeline". Run it for the main branch to build and deploy your site for the first time.
5. Go to "Deploy" > "Pages" to find your site's URL.

GitLab.com may ask you to verify your identity before running your first pipeline.

Auto-Deploy

Any commits to the main branch of your new project will trigger a new build and deploy. Merge requests are built without deploying, so a mistake in links.json is caught before it's merged. You can change this by editing .gitlab-ci.yml, which is the GitLab CI/CD pipeline for building the site and deploying to GitLab Pages.

Custom Domain

Without a custom domain, GitLab Pages serves your site from a unique domain, like https://my-links-123456.gitlab.io/, so your short links are at the root of the domain.

To use a custom domain, follow GitLab's guide: Custom domains and SSL/TLS certificates.

Updating Suri

To update Suri to its latest version:

npm install @surishortlink/suri@latest

Then commit the updated package.json and package-lock.json. Before updating to a new major version, check the release notes for breaking changes.

How It Works

Manage Links

At the heart of Suri is the links.json file, located in the src directory, where you manage your links. All of the template repositories include this file seeded with a few examples:

{
  "/": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsHiG-43Fzg",
  "1": "https://fee.org/articles/the-use-of-knowledge-in-society/",
  "gh": "https://github.com/surishortlink/suri"
}

It couldn't be simpler: the key is the "short link" path that gets redirected, and the value is the target URL. Keys can be as short or as long as you want, and can include / for nested paths, like gh/suri. Avoid ? and #, which browsers treat as the start of a query string or fragment. / is a special entry for redirecting the root path.

Build Static Site

Suri ships with a suri executable file that generates the static site from the links.json file. The static site is output to a directory named build.

All of the template repositories are configured with a build script that invokes this executable, making the command you run simple:

npm run build

When you make a change to the links.json file, simply re-run this command to re-generate the static site, which can then be re-deployed. This template repository is configured to do this automatically.

Config

Configuration is handled through the suri.config.json file in the root directory. There is only one option at this point:

Option	Description	Type	Default
js	Whether to redirect with JavaScript instead of a <meta> refresh.	Boolean	false

Public Directory

Finally, any files in the public directory will be copied over to the build directory without modification when the static site is built. This can be useful for files like favicon.ico or robots.txt (that said, Suri provides sensible defaults for both).