lychee link checking action

Quickly check links in Markdown, HTML, and text files using lychee.

When used in conjunction with Create Issue From File, issues will be created when the action finds link problems.

Usage

Here is a full example of a Github workflow file. It will check all repository links once per day and create an issue in case of errors. Save this under .github/workflows/links.yml:

name: Links

on:
  repository_dispatch:
  workflow_dispatch:
  schedule:
    - cron: "00 18 * * *"

jobs:
  linkChecker:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: Link Checker
        uses: lycheeverse/[email protected]
        with:
          args: --verbose --no-progress **/*.md **/*.html
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN}}
        
      - name: Create Issue From File
        uses: peter-evans/create-issue-from-file@v2
        with:
          title: Link Checker Report
          content-filepath: ./lychee/out.md
          labels: report, automated issue

Detailed arguments (args) information

This action uses lychee for link checking. lychee arguments can be passed to the action via the args parameter.

- name: Link Checker
  uses: lycheeverse/[email protected]
  with:
    args: --verbose --no-progress *.md

See lychee's documentation for all possible arguments.

Optional environment variables

Issues with links will be written to a file containing the error report. The default path is lychee/out.md. The path and filename may be overridden with the following variable:

• LYCHEE_OUT - The path to the output file for the Markdown error report

Creating a failing check for link errors

To create a failing check when there are link errors, you can use the exit_code output from the action as follows.

on: push
jobs:
  linkChecker:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: lychee Link Checker
        id: lychee
        uses: lycheeverse/[email protected]
      - name: Fail if there were link errors
        run: exit ${{ steps.lychee.outputs.exit_code }}

Troubleshooting and common problems

See lychee's Troubleshooting Guide for solutions to common link-checking problems.

Performance

A full CI run to scan 576 links takes approximately 1 minute for the analysis-tools-dev/static-analysis repository.

Credits

This action is based on peter-evans/link-checker and uses lychee (written in Rust) instead of liche (written in Go) for link checking. For a comparison of both tools, check out this comparison table.

License

lychee is licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.