...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.

Why?

The existing link checkers were not flexible enough for my use-case. lychee can...

• run requests concurrently (fully async Rust)
• 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
• run with a low memory/CPU footprint
• check multiple files at once
• support checking links from any website URL
• limit scheme (e.g. only check HTTPS links with "https")

SOON:

• automatically retry and backoff
• check relative and absolute paths
• support input files using wildcards
• set timeout for HTTP requests in seconds. Disabled by default.
• accept custom headers (see https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io/issues/788)
• use HEAD requests instead of GET to avoid network I/O
• show the progress
• show final status

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>

Thanks

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