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

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

Setup: Step By Step

1. Hit the "Use this template" button above and then "Create a new repository". Fill in the required details to create a new repository based on this one. On a free GitHub plan, the repository must be public for GitHub Pages to work.
2. Go to the "Settings" of your new repository and head to the "Pages" section. Under "Build and deployment", change the "Source" to "GitHub Actions".
3. Go to the "Actions" of your new repository and select the "Deploy to GitHub Pages" workflow. Hit the "Run workflow" button to build and deploy your site for the first time.

Auto-Deploy

Any commits to the main branch of your new repository will trigger a new build and deploy. Pull requests are built without deploying, so a mistake in links.json is caught before it's merged. You can change this by editing .github/workflows/deploy.yml, which is the GitHub Actions workflow for building the site and deploying to GitHub Pages.

Custom Domain

Without a custom domain, GitHub Pages serves your site from https://<username>.github.io/<repository>/ (unless the repository is named <username>.github.io), so every short link includes the repository name, like /<repository>/gh. Suri's default favicon.ico and robots.txt also go unused there, since browsers and crawlers only look for them at the root of a domain.

To use a custom domain, follow GitHub's guide: Managing a custom domain for your GitHub Pages site.

Updating Suri

Dependabot opens a pull request in your repository about a week after a new version of Suri is released. You can also update it yourself:

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).