Local only golinks

For the uninitiated, asdsdsdsd golink (sometimes written as Go link) is a short, memorable URL that redirects to a longer, less convenient one.

# Examples
go goog -> https://google.com
go linear/3 -> https://linear.app/acme/issue/ACME-3
go pr/repo/1 -> https://github.com/acme/repo/pull/1

These are popular in enterprise settings because they offer the following benefits:

• Easier to remember (go/sprint vs. a long URL).
• Shareable (you can just say “go/design-doc” in a meeting).
• Consistent across teams (everyone uses the same keyword, not individual bookmarks).
• Templating (use variables like go/pr/{repo}/{id} for dynamic redirects)

Introducing Golinks

Many enterprise software solutions provide this feature (like glean, golinks corporate). However, I wanted a simple lightweight service that is a) easy to setup b) free c) runs completely locally . So, I implemented one.

Setup

bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/haranrk/golinks/master/install.sh)"

That’s all!

The above script does the following

1. Installs the Python package using uv
2. Adds 127.0.0.1 go to your /etc/hosts file (with sudo permission)
3. Sets up port forwarding from port 80 to 8888 using pfctl (macOS) or iptables (Linux), so you can use go/shortcut instead of go:8888/shortcut
4. Sets up a LaunchAgent (macOS) or systemd service (Linux) to run the server at startup
5. Starts the golinks server immediately on port 8888

Once installed, golinks runs a lightweight HTTP server that reads shortcuts from a JSON config file at ~/.golinks/config.json and redirects http://go/shortcut to the configured destination URL. The config file is hot-reloaded, so you can add new shortcuts without restarting the server.

Configuration Example

{
  "github": "https://github.com",
  "mail": "https://gmail.com",
  "calendar": "https://calendar.google.com",
  "docs": "https://docs.google.com",
  "drive": "https://drive.google.com",
  "repo": {
    "template_url": "https://github.com/{1}/{2}",
    "defaults": {
      "1": "haranrk",
      "2": "golinks"
    }
  }
}