Open your first lane

LinkLane turns long, fragile URLs into short, shareable lanes. You can issue a lane in ten seconds without signing up — but the moment you make an account, every lane you open becomes traceable, editable, and printable as a QR.

Anonymous in ten seconds

On the home page, paste any URL into the hero field and press Shorten now. The backend generates a 7-character code from [A-Za-z0-9_-], creates a record in MongoDB, and returns a short link of the form https://linklane.io/abc1234. Beside it you'll see a print-ready QR code wired to the same code.

Anonymous shortening is rate-limited to ten lanes per IP per hour. The cap resets when the backend restarts, so it's forgiving in development and firm in production. When you hit the wall, you'll see a 429 response and a friendly toast.

Sign up for the good stuff

Create a free account to keep a permanent dashboard of your lanes, see clicks roll in, choose custom aliases like /spring-drop, and set expirations. Auth runs on email + password with bcrypt hashing and JWTs in httpOnly cookies — no third-party SSO required, and your browser handles refresh automatically.

The shortening flow, end to end

1. 1POST /api/links with { url, custom_alias?, expires_in_days?, domain_id? } returns a Link record.
2. 2Behind the scenes the server tries up to a few times to write a unique code if you didn't ask for an alias.
3. 3An asynchronous fetch grabs og:title, og:image, and a favicon for the destination, so the dashboard can show a thumbnail card.
4. 4When someone visits the short link, GET /api/r/{code} (or the SPA redirector at /:code) issues a 302 to the destination and writes a click_event with device, OS, browser, country, and referrer.

Print-ready QR codes

Every lane ships with a QR built by qrcode.react. It's pure black-on-paper, no rounded modules, sized to look crisp on packaging, posters, and stickers. You can right-click and save as PNG, or — on Pro — pull the SVG for vector print.