zws-im/zws

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1848 stars · 148 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

ZWS (Zero Width Shortener) is a self-hostable URL shortener that encodes link identifiers using invisible zero-width Unicode characters instead of random alphanumeric strings. It ships with a Next.js frontend, a REST API with OpenAPI documentation, and a Postgres database via Drizzle ORM.

Use cases

• shorten urls with invisible characters
• self-host a url shortener
• make links that look like they have no slug
• run a privacy-friendly link shortening service
• shorten urls via an api
• hide short link codes using zero-width spaces

When to choose

• you want a novel shortener where shortened links appear to have no visible slug
• you need a self-hosted shortener with a documented REST API
• you want to integrate shortening into tools like ShareX or custom scripts

When to avoid

• you need short links that are easy to read, type, or share verbally
• your target platform strips zero-width characters from text
• you need enterprise features like link analytics dashboards or team management

Facets

application · maturity active

http-server routing api-framework web-framework web-development apis self-hosted self-hosted url-shortener zero-width-characters unicode nextjs drizzle-orm postgres openapi nodejs web-server docker

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="zws-im/zws")