Link Verifier

A tool for verifying links in text-based files. Written in Go, available as executable.

Motivation

Ambitious tech writers use plain-text mark-up formats like AsciiDoc and Markdown for turning text into properly formatted blog posts, web pages and documentation. Incorporating URLs to refer to external resources is part of the process. Before publishing content it’s important to verify that linked URLs are valid and can be resolved. Nothing feels more unprofessional than broken links in a carefully crafted document.

Link verifier to the rescue! Automatically discover all mark-up files in a given directory and verify all links found in the documents before publishing them.

Installation

Prebuilt libraries

Prebuilt libraries for various platforms are available on GitHub. Just download, exact the archive and execute the binary.

Building from source

Building from source requires that you have Go installed on your machine.

go get -u -v github.com/bmuschko/link-verifier

Run the program with link-verifier from anywhere in the file system.

Command line options

Table 1. Parameters

Option	Description	Default Value
dirs	The comma-separated root directories used to recursively search for files.	[.]
includes	The comma-separated include patterns used to search for files.	[*.md,*.adoc]
ignore-status-codes	The comma-separated HTTP response status codes that will be ignored for validation. For example, some sites block crawlers and return with a specific response code.	[]
fail	Fails the program if at least one discovered link cannot be resolved.	true
timeout	The timeout in seconds used when calling the URL.	5

Example:

link-verifier --dirs data,content --include *.html,*.yml --fail false

Usage on CI

Integrating the tool with a build on CI is a breeze and can used as validation step before publishing mark-up files.

Travis CI

The following .travis.yml demonstrate the use of the prebuilt binary version on Linux 64 bit:

before_script:
  - wget https://github.com/bmuschko/link-verifier/releases/download/v0.1/link-verifier-0.1-linux64.tar.gz -O /tmp/link-verifier.tar.gz
  - tar -xvf /tmp/link-verifier.tar.gz
  - export PATH=$PATH:$PWD/link-verifier/

script:
  - ./link-verifier

Contribute!

It’s easy to contribute to this project. Install Go >= 1.11. Then run the following commands to get the source code, resolve external dependencies and build the project.

git clone https://github.com/bmuschko/link-verifier.git
cd link-verifier
go build