Check markdown links with github action

#github #markdown

In a previous blog post, I discussed checking links with Perl and LWP::Simple then LWP::UserAgent.

My original idea was to keep perlres (a directory of Perl resources) up to date.

My previous post discussed the links checker but ignored the markdown parsing. This time, I propose to use a github action that will do the whole thing, elegantly.

During my research, I found 2 github actions to check links in markdown files, both based on markdown parser written in javascript.

lychee-action based on lychee and github-action-markdown-links-check based on markdown-links-check.

I tried the second one, that has more "stars" 😀

The code

Simple, I just copy pasted the code provided by the maintainer !

name: Check Markdown links

on: push

jobs:
  markdown-link-check:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@master
    - uses: gaurav-nelson/github-action-markdown-link-check@v1

In a file .github/workflow/checklinks.yml and on a branch checklinks (to test my stuff before integrating in the main branch).

I push the code, it starts testing, freezes a moment without logs (about 700 links to check) and fails admirably.

Yes, this github action fails on dead links (lychee-action seems to behaves differently on this point)

Do not fail on error

First, I have some "flaky" links, so I would prefer to not fail but only report.

The solution is continue-on-error: true

So this first customization is fine but my action is still not perfect.

Do not run on every push

I often edit 3 typos in a row of 3 commits, it's too brutal to run at each code push, I would prefer to schedule it once a week:

on:
  schedule:
  - cron: "0 13 * * 1"

See this other post from where I extracted the cron line.

429 Too Many Requests

This is the typical github answer after too much requests, so I would like to ignore this status when it happens.

To achieve this, I added a mlc_config.json to my root git directory and added this config inside:

{
  "aliveStatusCodes": [429, 200]
}

And finally look at our nice report:

And the errors:

Conclusion

You can see my addition in this Pull Request

The final action code is:

name: Check Markdown links

on:
  schedule:
  - cron: "0 13 * * 1"

jobs:
  markdown-link-check:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@master
    - uses: gaurav-nelson/github-action-markdown-link-check@v1
      continue-on-error: true