Ever come across a suspicious short URL and wanted to know where it really goes?

*Deref (pronounced "De-Ref") is a quick experiment in learning AngularJS with a SlimPHP backend.

It uses cURL to follow the redirect chain on pasted URLs, logging all the hops and showing the final result using Angular and Twitter Bootstrap.

To try it out, clone the source and use Composer to install vendors:

$> composer install

Or, check it out online at https://deref.link/

Once the vendors are installed, you can set up a virtual host using apache or nginx, using a standard rewrite rule to send traffic to web/index.php.

Another option is to use the internal PHP webserver:

$> php -S localhost:8080 -t web/

This will start the server on port 8080, which you can then visit in your web browser to try out the service.

Creating a config.php file is optional; currently, it's only needed if you want to specify analytics code.

Here's what a config.php file should look like:

<?php

return [
    'analytics' => "... code goes here ...",
];

Kevin Boyd created *Deref as part of an AngularJS blog post on whateverthing.com.

*Deref is released under the MIT open-source license.