---
title: "Hot: Firefly 1.3.0 URL Shortener released"
kind: article
slug: hot-firefly-130-url-shortener-released
created_at: 2011-02-01
tags:
  - firefly
---
I've been doing some work on Firefly lately and tonight I've released
version 1.3.0. If you're using Firefly it's recommended you upgrade to
the latest and greatest version.
~
For those who missed it: Firefly is a simple URL shortener gem
that can be used to host your own personal (or corporate) URL shortner
on your own domain. Since Firefly is rack-based, it's easy to deploy to
Heroku or other ruby hosting providers.

### What's new

Since version 1.1.0 (released october 2010) these features have been
added. I'll just summarize those and ignore the 1.2.x release I made.

 * Make Barby optional to save some gems for those of us who don't need QR code generation. [mboeh]
 * Added a CodeFactory to generate unique short codes (and prevent collisions with custom short codes) [ariejan]
 * Support for specifying one's own preferred short codes via the API. Also, invalid URL creations return a 422 code, not 200. [mboeh]
 * Added GUI support for custom short codes. [ariejan]
 * Improved error handling / reporting [ariejan]
 * Minor tweaks to the web GUI [ariejan]
 * Use dm-mysql-adapater as default, dm-sqlite-adapter is optional [ariejan]

### How to upgrade

**IMPORTANT**: Always make a backup of your data before you upgrade.

Simple install the latest gem version and restart your server.

    gem install firefly -v1.3.0

Then restart your server. DataMapper will take care of migrating your
database for you.

**NOTE**: Firefly is now using MySQL by default. If you were using
sqlite3 before, please install the appropriate DataMapper adapater: `gem
install dm-sqlite-adapter`

### Code, Issues, Forking

Want to fork? [http://github.com/ariejan/firefly][1]

[1]: http://github.com/ariejan/firefly