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DSLF

Your links, on your own box.

Damn Small Link Forwarder is a self-hosted link shortener and link-index page. The configuration is a CSV file. There is no database, no dashboard and no account, because a redirect does not need any of them.

redirects.csv pick one

url,target,status

on the wire

GET /gh HTTP/1.1

301 Moved Permanently
location: https://github.com/you
content-length: 0

rust ·5 MB binary·under 10 MB resident·0 databases·amd64 and arm64

See it running Source on GitHub Why I built it

Run it

The image ships with example configuration, so it starts before you have written anything of your own.

docker run -p 3000:3000 \
  -v $(pwd)/redirects.csv:/app/redirects.csv \
  ghcr.io/vpetersson/dslf:latest

Write one row per link: the path, where it goes, and 301 or 302. Mount the file at runtime, or bake it into an image. Then point a domain at it. Any host that can run a container will do, because it is one process listening on one port.

The second file, if you want it

redirects.csv is the only file you need. Add link-index.yaml and the root path serves a link-index page instead of a 404.

profile:
  name: "Your Name"
  bio: "Short line about you"

theme:
  preset: mocha # mocha | macchiato | frappe | latte
  buttonStyle: glass # glass | solid | outline

Both files can be mounted at runtime, so changing a link is a file edit and a restart rather than a deploy.

What you get

Real redirects

Proper 301 and 302 responses with a Location header, so curl, scripts and link checkers follow them the way browsers do.

No database

Configuration is a CSV file and an optional YAML file. Nothing to migrate, back up, or wake up for at 3am.

No tracking

No analytics, no cookies, no third-party requests. Visitors are redirected and that is the end of it.

A link-index page

An optional landing page in place of a hosted link-in-bio service, themed with Catppuccin.

Import what you have

Pull your existing short links out of Rebrandly with a single command.

Published with an SBOM

Every release publishes a software bill of materials, so what is inside the image is a matter of record.

Apache-2.0 licensed, built in Rust. Source, issues, and images at ghcr.io/vpetersson/dslf.