First, I’d like to talk about why I wanted to include Bitly links.

1. Despite the continued prevalence of social media buttons, there’s a decent wealth of data demonstrating they don’t work.
2. I have no interest in providing free advertising for large, ethically bankrupt corporations whose policies I do not approve of.
3. It’s kind of fun! For no charge (aside from the domain) one can get personalized shortened permalinks.

When I made the first version of this website with Jekyll there was a simple plugin that caught my eye that made it dead simple to add short URLs from the Bitly API. When I thought I was going to move my website over to Metalsmith I even wrote an integration plugin as one didn’t exist yet.

Ultimately, I landed on building an API with Django, but the plugins I found didn’t accomplish what I was hoping for. Django-bitly didn’t fit my needs as I was only using Django to serve an JSON, not HTML. Most related snippets and examples I found were for outdated versions of the Bitly API, outdated versions of Django, or both.

In order to use the solution I came up with you’ll need:

• You Bitly Token and Bitly Group GUID
• A working understanding of environment variables, django-environs and os.environ. Please don’t commit sensitive information to your repo.
• Extra credit: learn about the benefits of environment variables beyond security.

Include something like the following in your relevant model file.

from django.db import models
from dirtyfields import DirtyFieldsMixin
import requests
import os

class Post(DirtyFieldsMixin, models.Model):
    # you don't need to have your slug as your primary_key
    # but you do need a reference to whatever your path is
    # in addition to your root domain
    slug = models.SlugField(primary_key=True)
    shortlink = models.CharField(max_length=20, null=True, blank=True, default='')

    def set_shortlink(self):
        url = "https://api-ssl.bitly.com/v4/shorten"
        headers = {
            "Host": "api-ssl.bitly.com",
            "Accept": "application/json",
            "Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ.get('BITLY_TOKEN')}"
        }
        payload = {
            "group_guid": os.environ.get('BITLY_GROUP_GUID'),
            "long_url": f"https://welchcanavan.com/{self.slug}"
        }
        # constructing this request took a good amount of guess
        # and check. thanks Postman!
        r = requests.post(url, headers=headers, json=payload)

        if r.status_code is 200:
            self.shortlink = r.json()[u'id']

    def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
        # if the short link doesn't have a value *or* the
        # slug that the short link is based off of has changed
        if not self.shortlink or 'slug' in self.get_dirty_fields():
            self.set_shortlink()

            super().save(*args, **kwargs)

This example has been shortened for brevity, the full context can be found at this site’s repository.

Extra credit: learn about the benefits of environment variables aside from security.