...because who says I can't write yet another link checker.

What?

This thing was created from Hello Rust Episode 10. It's a link checker that treats Github links specially by using a GITHUB_TOKEN to avoid getting blocked less by the rate limiter.

TODO: Add screenshots here

Why?

The existing link checkers were not flexible enough for my use-case. lychee runs all requests fully asynchronously and has a low memory/CPU footprint.

lychee can...

• handle links inside Markdown, HTML, and other documents
• handle chunked encodings
• handle gzip compression
• fake user agents (required for some firewalls)
• skip non-links like anchors or relative URLs
• exclude some websites with regular expressions
• handle a configurable number of redirects
• disguise as a different user agent (like curl)
• optionally ignore SSL certificate errors (--insecure)
• check multiple files at once (supports globbing)
• support checking links from any website URL
• limit scheme (e.g. only check HTTPS links with "https")
• accept custom headers (e.g. for cases like https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io/issues/788)
• show final summary/statistics
• optionally use HEAD requests instead of GET
• show colored output
• filter based on status codes (https://github.com/tcort/markdown-link-check/issues/94) (e.g. --accept 200,204)

SOON:

• automatically retry and backoff
• set timeout for HTTP requests in seconds (--timeout). Default is 10s. Set to 0 for no timeout.
• check relative (base-url to set project root)
• show the progress interactively (--progress)
• usable as a library (https://github.com/raviqqe/liche/issues/13)
• exclude private domains (https://github.com/appscodelabs/liche/blob/a5102b0bf90203b467a4f3b4597d22cd83d94f99/url_checker.go)
• recursion
• check mailto links (disable with no-mailto) (https://www.npmjs.com/package/isemail)

How?

cargo install lychee

Set an environment variable with your token like so GITHUB_TOKEN=xxxx.

Run it inside a repository with a README.md or specify a different Markdown file with

lychee <yourfile>

Comparison

Collecting other link checkers here to crush them in comparison. :P

• https://github.com/dkhamsing/awesome_bot
• https://github.com/tcort/markdown-link-check
• https://github.com/raviqqe/liche
• https://github.com/raviqqe/muffet

Thanks

...to my Github sponsors and Patreon sponsors for supporting these projects. If you want to help out as well, go here.