Kutt v3 is under development

[poeti8]

Yes, the day has come.

I decided to devote my time to this project again. I'm humbled by all the stars, the count of forks, the amount of users, and bittersweetly, by the number of issues, and I want to make sure it's as easy and simple to use as it could be for everyone.

Yesterday, I read about goo.gl and how they are killing all its links. So I understand how important it is for users to own their own links, and I made a reliable and easy self-hosted Kutt as my main goal for the next version.

Here are the key things I've planned for the version 3:

• Seamless installation.
  • Install with minimal knowledge required.
  • See where people struggled the most and solve them.
• Assume the barest functionality.
  • Use sqlite by default, and only use Postgres if a user wants to.
  • Only use redis, emails, and other features if a user enables them explicitly.
  • Minimize dependencies as much as possible.
• Better logs and error messages.
• Focus on private instances.
• Remove anything Google.
• Replace Next.js. There's no way I'll upgrade to Next.js 14 since I dislike it so much. I plan to move away from React too. Nothing's wrong with React, I just think something more lightweight would suit this project. I like to try htmx.
• Add an admin page to manage links and users.
• Improve performance. This one is for the Kutt.it instance itself to make sure it can handle millions of links with no sweats.
• Enable signup on kutt.it again (after I found a way to prevent spam.)
• Write new guides and improve documentation. Make video walkthroughs.
• And finally, go through open issues, and fix those that I think have high priority.

There are much more to add. I'll hopefully work on them once I've completed the important ones listed above. If you think I'm missing something, let me know.

This is not short and quick, and it would probably make some time to finish. You can follow the progress on the v3 branch.

[trgwii]

Make the bullet points a checklist!

better-sqlite3 is the best pure SQLite npm library for node, BUT node recently added builtin SQLite: https://nodejs.org/api/sqlite.html Maybe we could use that and eventually work towards runtime agnosticism

[poeti8]

Make the bullet points a checklist!

I've made a Kanban board and put everything I could think of.

better-sqlite3 is the best pure SQLite npm library for node, BUT node recently added builtin SQLite: https://nodejs.org/api/sqlite.html Maybe we could use that and eventually work towards runtime agnosticism

Nice! I'll try it out.

[sqkkyzx]

I am pleasantly surprised! This is awesome! I have been using Kutt for a long time, and I am very satisfied with everything that exists. I hope that V3 won't break the existing data or that there will be a recommended data migration guide.

If possible, I would love to see the UI incorporate i18n!

[trgwii]

Data migration should be fully supported

[muelsyse-az]

Yeahhhhh we're so back with this one!

[chrislawso]

IMO the project is already very well polished and you have done great work. Installation with docker is super simple already and getting the .env setup is also already simple.

The only minor pain points I see are: lack of admin user management which you already identified as: "Add an admin page to manage links and users." links do not show who was author/creator of url author/creator cant control whether other users may edit or delete url urls dont have any associated text field for notes to provide extra info on url purpose/usage lack of csv output, or import/export function to quickly get all data out of instance.

Thank you

[kenarsuleyman]

We can not thank enough for the effort you put into this. Do you plan to write MySQL wrappers for Postgres-only functions to support them both? For example MySQL also supports UUID fields, you can generate them inside JS instead of using postgres internal UUID function. Wish I know JS, I'd be so happy to contribute into this project.

[poeti8]

@kenarsuleyman It should be easy to add support for MySQL as well. I'll make sure to include it in the v3 release.