kurz [kʊrts]

A minimal, self-hosted URL shortener built with Rust + Axum.

Features

• Password-protected single-page UI
• Three slug generation modes: random string, random words, custom
• Persistent storage via SQLite (bundled, no install needed)
• Hit counter per link

Quick Start

# 1. Edit the config (as needed)
cp config.toml my-config.toml
$EDITOR my-config.toml

# 2. Build & run
cargo build --release
./target/release/kurz my-config.toml

# 3. Open http://localhost:3000 in your browser

Configuration (config.toml)

Key	Description
server.host	Bind address (default 127.0.0.1)
server.port	Port (default 3000)
server.base_url	Public URL used in short-link output
auth.password	UI login password
auth.session_secret	Random secret for session tokens
database.path	SQLite file path
shortener.random_string_length	Length for random string slugs (default 10)
shortener.random_word_count	Words in random-word slugs (default 3)
shortener.word_separator	Separator between words (default -)
ui.accent_color	Main accent color of the application (default #377216)

Running Behind a Reverse Proxy

Set server.host = "127.0.0.1" and configure nginx/caddy to proxy to it. Make sure base_url reflects your public domain:

[server]
base_url = "https://kurz.example.com"

Building

Simply use the Makefile (used as a command-runner in this project):

make build

or manually via:

cargo run --release

Developing

Use make watch to watch over all file changes in rs|html|css files while developing. It uses watchexec, so you'll need to install it first. You can adjust the feature flags (see below) as needed.

Binary Features

• livereload: adds tower-livereload middleware for faster development
• disable_auth: disables the login screen and authentication checks

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! The project is very minimal, so I won't merge giant features, as I want to keep it true to it's core.