YOURLS

YOURLS (Your Own URL Shortener) is a minimal self-hosted URL shortener written in PHP. You install it on your own domain, and from that point forward you control every short link you create, the analytics attached to them, and the data generated by every click.

The admin interface handles link creation, editing, and deletion. Each short link generates click statistics including referrers, geographic data, and timestamps, accessible from the dashboard or via the built-in API. A bookmarklet lets you shorten any page you are visiting in one click without opening the admin panel.

A plugin architecture extends YOURLS significantly beyond its default feature set. The community has built plugins for QR code generation, API authentication, private links, bulk imports, custom slugs, link expiry, and more. Most organizations run two or three plugins to cover the gaps in the default install.

YOURLS is MIT-licensed and free. It requires PHP and MySQL, which means it runs on nearly any shared hosting plan or VPS alongside other PHP applications. Setup takes about ten minutes.

The main limitation is that YOURLS is minimal by design. The default admin UI is functional but dated, and some features that Shlink includes natively (multi-domain support, more detailed analytics) require YOURLS plugins. For simple use cases on a single domain, it is one of the most straightforward URL shorteners to self-host.