Introduction

Links are the bread and butter of Dub.

Everything on Dub starts with a link. Whether you’re creating:

• a handful of links for your marketing campaign
• hundreds of links for your affiliate program
• thousands of links, programmatically, for your SMS campaign

In this guide, we’ll cover the link model, how to create links, and more.

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The link model

The link model consists of the following properties:

For more advanced features like custom link previews, conversion tracking, and more, see the full list of properties below;

You can use the various Dub SDKs to programmatically manage your links.

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Create a link

The url field, representing the destination URL, is the sole mandatory parameter required for the creation of a new short link.

import { Dub } from "dub";

export const dub = new Dub({
  token: process.env.DUB_API_KEY,
});

const link = await dub.links.create({
  url: "https://google.com",
});

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Update a link

An existing link can be updated by providing the id to the update method. This method returns the updated link as a response.

You can use either the linkId or an externalId prefixed with ext_ which is a unique identifier for the link in your own database to associate it with the link in Dub’s system.

import { Dub } from "dub";

export const dub = new Dub({
  token: process.env.DUB_API_KEY,
});

const link = await dub.links.update("link_eBKA4MT44XnI17hYLchkjUOd", {
  url: "https://www.google.uk", // new URL
});

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Upsert a link

Upserting a link is a combination of creating and updating a link. If a link with the same URL already exists, return it (or update it if there are any changes). Otherwise, a new link will be created.

This allows you to use the upsert method without the necessity of checking for the link’s existence beforehand.

import { Dub } from "dub";

export const dub = new Dub({
  token: process.env.DUB_API_KEY,
});

const link = await dub.links.upsert({
  url: "https://google.com", // will always be the same short link
});