How can I find broken links within my documentation?

[nh916]

I am writing documentation with markdown files and python docstrings, how can I find all the broken links in the terminal and fix them?

[squidfunk]

There's the htmlproofer plugin which I think does what you request. We plan to add support for external link validation to the privacy plugin in the future, as it already processes external links and adding validation seems like a natural fit, but currently no ETA.

Internal link validation is a different story though.

[nh916]

I was having issues with both internal and external links as many of both were broken and I was not getting any notification for it in the terminal. I think this could have been for several reasons.

1. I was inputting links with html tags instead of md tags
2. I was inputting links into docstrings and generating documentation from there
3. I had another MD issue and it prevented from discovering broken links

I ended up using Xenu's Link Checker and screaming frog to find all the broken links locally for now and fix them.

However, this is more of a short term solution because ideally I want anything that breaks in documentation to immediately pop up in the CI for us to quickly catch and fix, so the user never sees a broken documentation

[squidfunk]

Jup, as said, we'll tackle external links (and maybe internal as well) later. In the meantime, using external services or third-party plugins is a good idea 😊