A command-line tool to find broken links in your static site.
Fast. docs.sentry.io produces
1.1 GB of HTML files. All alternatives we tried were slower
than hyperlink on this site.
hyperlink handles this amount of data in 4 seconds on a MacBook Pro 2018.
Pay for what you need. By default, hyperlink checks for hard 404s in
internal links only. Anything beyond that is opt-in. See Options
for a list of features to enable.
Maps back errors to source files. If your static site was created from
Markdown files, hyperlink can try to find the original broken link by
fuzzy-matching the content around it. See the --sources option.
Supports traversing file-system paths only, no arbitrary URLs.
No support for the <base> tag.
No support for external links. It does not know how to speak HTTP.
Even if you don't have a static site, you can put hyperlink to work by first downloading the entire website using e.g. suckit. In certain cases this is faster than other tools too.
Does not honor robots.txt. A broken link is still broken for users even if
not indexed by Google.
Does not parse CSS files, as broken links in CSS have not been a practical concern for us. We are concerned about broken link in the page content, not the chrome around it.
Only supports UTF-8 encoded HTML files.
Download the latest binary and:
```bash
./hyperlink public/
./hyperlink public/ --check-anchors
./hyperlink public/ --sources src/ ```
Or as GitHub action:
yaml
- uses: untitaker/hyperlink@0.1.17
with:
args: public/ --sources src/
Or build from source by installing Rust and running
cargo build --release.
When invoked without options, hyperlink only checks for 404s of internal
links. However, it can do more.
-j/--jobs: How many threads to spawn for parsing HTML. By default
hyperlink will attempt to saturate your CPU.
--check-anchors: Opt-in, check for validity of anchors on pages. Broken
anchors are considered warnings, meaning that hyperlink will exit 2 if
there are only broken anchors but no hard 404s.
--sources: A folder of markdown files that were the input for the HTML
hyperlink has to check. This is used to provide better error messages that
point at the actual file to edit. hyperlink does very simple content-based
matching to figure out which markdown files may have been involved in the
creation of a HTML file.
Why not just crawl and validate links in Markdown at this point? Answer:
There are countless of proprietary extensions to markdown out there for creating intra-page links that are generally not supported by link checking tools.
The structure of your markdown content does not necessarily match the
structure of your HTML (i.e. what the user actually sees). With this setup,
hyperlink does not have to assume anything about your build pipeline.
--github-actions: Emit GitHub actions
errors,
i.e. add error messages in-line to PR diffs. This is only useful with
--sources set.
If you are using hyperlink through the GitHub action this option is already
set. It is only useful if you are downloading/building and running hyperlink
yourself in CI.
exit 1: There have been errors (hard 404s)exit 2: There have been only warnings (broken anchors)wummel/linkchecker seems to be the most feature rich out of all, but was a non-starter due to performance. This applies to other countless link checkers we tried that are not mentioned here.
linkcheck is faster than linkchecker
but still quite slow on large sites.
We tried linkcheck together with
http-server on localhost,
although that does not seem to be the bottleneck at all.
htmltest is one of the fastest
linkcheckers we've tried (after disabling most checks to ensure feature
parity with hyperlink), however is still slower than hyperlink in
single-threaded mode (-j 1)
muffet seems to have similar performance
as htmltest. We tested muffet with
http-server and webfsd without
noticing a change in timings.
liche seems to be closest in performance
to hyperlink.
Licensed under the MIT, see ./LICENSE.