rlinks

What is rlinks?

rlinks is the authoritative control plane and global edge runtime for the rmax.to redirect fabric. It is an identity infrastructure system, not a marketing shortener or multi-tenant SaaS.

It provides a typed, schema-first redirect system managed via a CLI-first workflow, ensuring strict safety guarantees for high-value links.

Architecture & Planes

The system is divided into strict responsibility planes:

• Infrastructure Plane: Managed by Terraform.
• Control Plane: The rlinks CLI handles validation and mutation.
• Runtime Plane: Stateless Cloudflare Workers serving from KV at the edge.

Redirect Lifecycle & Schema

Every redirect is a typed object that moves through a strict lifecycle: Creation via CLI → Validation → KV Write → Worker Lookup → Hit Logging → Disable/Rotate.

The schema enforces invariants (no loops, no reserved words, HTTPS only) and supports forward-only versioning. Key fields include:

• v: Schema version
• code: The short path
• target: Destination URL
• rules: Routing logic
• stats: Observability metrics

Safety Guarantees

We treat redirects as critical infrastructure. Our safety guarantees include:

• No Loops: Strictly enforced by validation logic.
• Reserved Names: Critical paths cannot be overwritten.
• Disable-over-Delete: History is preserved; bad links are disabled, not erased.
• Append-only Logs: Full audit trail of hits and mutations.
• No Silent Failures: All errors are explicit.

CLI & Operations

The rlinks CLI is the only approved way to mutate state. It enforces the write pipeline: rlinks-cli → rlinks-core → rlinks-kv → Cloudflare KV.

# Create a new redirect
rlinks set --code "infra" --target "https://github.com/rmax-ai/infra"

# Disable a redirect
rlinks disable "infra"

# Inspect redirect details
rlinks get "infra" --json
            

Development & Contribution

Developers must adhere to strict guidelines:

• Schema-First: All changes start with the schema.
• Invariants: Tests must verify safety guarantees.
• Local Dev: Use local Cloudflare KV emulation; no direct production KV writes.
• Performance: Respect runtime guardrails (<10ms target).

Review GUIDELINES.md and DEVELOPMENT.md before contributing. Standard cargo test, clippy, and fmt rules apply.

Roadmap

Planned capabilities for the rlinks fabric:

• Analytics pipeline
• Canary routing
• Temporal redirects
• Signed links
• Geo-aware routing