Tollbooth Shortlinks

Don't Pester Your Customer™ (DPYC™) — Ephemeral, human-friendly short URLs for the Tollbooth ecosystem.

The metaphors in this project are drawn with admiration from The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, illustrated by Jules Feiffer (1961). Milo, Tock, the Tollbooth, Dictionopolis, and Digitopolis are creations of Mr. Juster's extraordinary imagination. We just built the payment infrastructure.

Why This Exists

OAuth Authorization URLs are long, ugly, and hostile to copy-paste:

https://api.schwab.com/v1/oauth/authorize?client_id=abc123&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2F
fastmcp.cloud%2Foauth%2Fcallback%3Fserver_id%3D...&scope=...&response_type=code&state=...

Traditional link shorteners have become opinionated. They inject interstitial pages, track clicks, require accounts, gate features behind paywalls, or silently expire links on their own schedule. When an MCP server needs to hand a patron a one-time URL for an OAuth dance, none of that belongs in the path.

Tollbooth Shortlinks is a community utility with no monetization. It turns any URL into a memorable four-word phrase like brave-otter-finds-gold, stores the mapping in Neon Postgres, and expires it after 24 hours. A companion Val Town HTTP handler does the 302 redirect with zero interstitial.

Related MCP server: url-shortener-mcp

How It Works

MCP Server / Patron          Shortlinks MCP        Neon        Val Town
    |                              |                 |              |
    |-- create_shortlink(url) ---->|-- INSERT ------>|              |
    |<-- short_url ----------------|                 |              |
    |                              |                 |              |
    |-- GET /brave-otter-finds-gold ---------------------------->   |
    |                              |                 |<-- lookup ---|
    |<-- 302 redirect ----------------------------------------------|
    |                              |                 |              |
    |        (24h later)           |  expired rows are deleted      |

Tools

All tools are free -- no credits, no npub, no Tollbooth ledger required.

Install

pip install -e ".[dev]"

Run Locally

export NEON_SHORTLINKS_URL="<your Neon connection string>"
# optional: the redirect host put in front of each slug (default https://tollbooth.val.run)
export SHORTLINK_REDIRECT_BASE="https://tollbooth.val.run"
python -c "from server import mcp; mcp.run()"

The Val Town handler in val/redirect.js reads the same NEON_SHORTLINKS_URL.

Deploy to Horizon

The fastmcp.json at the repo root is ready for fastmcp deploy.

DPYC Identity

Tollbooth Shortlinks is registered as an Advocate in the DPYC Social Contract. Peer MCP servers discover its URL by asking the Oracle, and create_shortlink returns the full short_url, so a peer never needs the redirect host:

from tollbooth.oracle_client import default_oracle_client

svc = await default_oracle_client().resolve_service(name="tollbooth-shortlinks")
shortlinks_url = (svc or {}).get("url", "")

Operators built on tollbooth-dpyc get this for free: tollbooth.shortlinks.create_shortlink(url) does the lookup and the call, best-effort.

Related Repos

The Tollbooth DPYC™ ecosystem:

License

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE for details.