Link/URL Shortener and Meta Data Access Tutorial

If you’re looking to build a link/URL shortener and access meta data from URLs using Next.js, Vercel, React, Node.js, and Cheerio, you’ve come to the right place. In this tutorial, we’ll walk through the steps to create a simple but powerful tool for shortening URLs and extracting meta data from them.

What you’ll need

• Next.js
• Vercel
• React
• Node.js
• Cheerio

Setting up the project

To get started, create a new Next.js project and set up Vercel for deployment. Next, set up your Node.js server that will handle the URL shortening and meta data access. You’ll also want to create a React front end for users to input URLs and view the shortened links and meta data.

Creating the link shortener

Using Node.js, create an API endpoint that accepts a long URL and returns a shortened version. There are many libraries available for generating short URLs, such as shortid or nanoid. Once the shortened URL is generated, save it to a database for future use.

Extracting meta data

To extract meta data from a URL, you can use Cheerio, a fast, flexible, and lean implementation of core jQuery designed specifically for the server. Use Cheerio to make an HTTP request to the desired URL and then parse the returned HTML to extract the meta data, such as title, description, and image.

Displaying the results

In your React front end, create a form for users to input URLs and a component to display the shortened link and meta data. When a user submits a URL, make a request to your Node.js server to generate the shortened URL and extract the meta data. Then, display the results to the user.

Conclusion

By combining Next.js, Vercel, React, Node.js, and Cheerio, you can create a powerful link shortener and meta data access tool. This tutorial has covered the basic steps to get you started, but there are many ways to expand and improve upon this project. Have fun building and exploring the possibilities!