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README for outbound

This project is a small Flask app that merely redirects to the link farther down the URL. The purpose is to enable my web server to record visits to outbound links. This is not a URL shortener or obfuscator. It's a cheap way for me to see what links my site vistors use, without using javascript.

Upstream

The original project is at https://bgstack15.ddns.net/cgit/outbound/.

Features/design goals

  • redirect only if referer is in whitelist
  • simple web config
  • simple app config
  • send to web server logs the redirects, or else 404s for invalid link requests

Alternatives

Probably some "proper" web analytics suite or javascript garbage that I do not want to learn or use.

Reason for existence

To show what links on my site are used.

Using

Web app

Run a simple dev environment.

FLASK_APP=outbound.py FLASK_DEBUG=True flask run --host=0.0.0.0 --extra-files outbound.conf

Testing the web app with curl

$ curl --header "Referer: http://d2-03a:5000/" --header 'Debug: true' http://d2-03a:5000/http://server3/
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">
<title>Redirecting...</title>
<h1>Redirecting...</h1>
<p>You should be redirected automatically to target URL: <a href="http://server3/">http://server3/</a>. If not click the link.

Improvements

  • Provide an apache wsgi config?
  • Provide an nginx wsgi config?

Dependencies

For the web app:

  • apache with mod_wsgi
  • python3-flask

References

  1. fuss.conf.example
  2. fuss.py
  3. coupons_web.py
  4. https://werkzeug.palletsprojects.com/en/2.2.x/serving/#werkzeug.serving.run_simple
  5. various fifconfig files

Internal documents

  1. ports.txt: outbound 4682/tcp
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