Simple PHP Redirector

Make your own short URL service

✍️ Jacob Mulquin
📅 05/12/2021

I've developed some Microsoft Forms for RLA over the past few days and find the URLs are ridiculous, even their shortened version.

Here's a super simple script I whipped up so we can offer clients an easy to remember link:

<?php

$routes = [
    '/' => 'https://mulquin.com',
    '/google' => 'https://google.com',
    '/bing' => 'https://bing.com'
];

$route = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
$redirect_to = $routes['/'];

if (in_array($route, array_keys($routes))) {
    $redirect_to = $routes[$route];
}

header('Location: ' . $redirect_to);

The code is quite self evident, if you navigate to /google it will redirect to https://google.com.

Obviously this script is not ideal long-term for a few reasons:

It cannot handle complex route rules
The code needs to be touched for routes to be added or edited
It does not track clicks to figure out if links are required

For this to work on an Apache server, you need to setup a simple .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^.*$ /index.php [L,QSA]

I hope this can be helpful for you.