Rilato Short Link Maker

$37.00 Version 8.0 · PHP + MariaDB · one file

Your own link shortener, on your own short domain, serving from the root: yourdomain.com/az goes wherever you say. One PHP file, a dashboard, and a click log that tells you who clicked, when, and from where.

Short links you do not control are a liability

Every link you shorten with somebody else's service is a link you have lent them. They see your click data. They decide whether the link keeps working. Free shorteners have been shut down before, taking millions of live links with them, and the links did not fail politely — they simply stopped resolving, in emails sent years earlier, in printed material, in posts you no longer control.

There is a smaller irritation too. When you cannot see the destination behind a short link, neither can anybody else, which is exactly why spam filters and security tools distrust the popular shorteners. Your link inherits their reputation.

A link on your domain
carries your reputation, not somebody else's.

What it does

Point a short domain at one PHP file and every path under it becomes a link you control. The dashboard is where you add them, and there is no installer — the tables create themselves the first time you open it.

What you get out of it

• The links are yours. Your domain, your database, your click data. Nobody can switch them off or start charging for them.
• You find dead links before your visitors do. The script tests destinations for real and records what came back.
• You can see who clicked. Not a number in isolation — the last twenty visits with address, time and country, one click away.
• 301 or 302, per link. Permanent where you want the SEO value to pass, temporary where you might change the destination.

Features

• Password-protected dashboard using bcrypt, with add, edit and delete for every link.
• Live destination checking. A Check button per link makes a real HTTP request and stores the status code, the final URL after redirects, and the date of the check. A Check All button does the lot.
• Automatic periodic checks from a daily cron that only does real work every few days, with a heartbeat recorded on every run so a broken crontab entry shows up instead of going quiet.
• Click counter per link. Click the number and it expands in place to show the last twenty visits with IP address, date, time and country.
• Reset zeroes a counter, optionally wiping that link's visit log with it.
• Your choice of geolocation back end for the country column.
• Dates that mean something: added, last modified, last clicked.
• Search box and CSV export for when the list gets long.
• Active and paused per link, and bot filtering so crawlers do not inflate your counts.
• An .htaccess generator built into the settings panel, which reads the script's real filename at runtime so the snippet it gives you is always correct.
• Email alerts with a proper envelope sender, so SPF passes and the alert does not land in spam.

When something breaks, it tells the right person

A detail worth calling out, because most scripts get it wrong. If the database connection fails, a visitor sees a neutral 503 with a reference code — not the driver's message. "Access denied for user 'pe301_links'@'localhost'" on a public page hands a passer-by your database user and host, which is half a credential and a clear signal the site is worth probing.

The real message and a diagnosis go to the error log where only you can read them, keyed by that reference code. And the diagnosis is specific: error 1698 means the account uses socket authentication and a password will never work; 1049 means no such database, which on Linux is usually a capitalisation mistake. Each one prints the exact SQL that fixes it.

A 503 with Retry-After rather than a 500 also means crawlers come back later instead of dropping the URL.

System requirements

• PHP 8.1 or newer, with PDO and cURL.
• MariaDB or MySQL. Tables created automatically on first run.
• Apache with mod_rewrite, so paths reach the script. The snippet is generated for you.
• A short domain to point at it. Any domain works; short ones are nicer.
• Optional: a cron entry for the periodic destination checks, and a geolocation database for the country column.