Check websites for broken links

Introduction

LinkChecker is a free, GPL licensed website validator. LinkChecker checks links in web documents or full websites. It runs on Python 3 systems, requiring Python 3.8 or later.

Visit the project on GitHub.

Installation

$ pip3 install linkchecker

The version in the pip repository may be old, to find out how to get the latest code, plus platform-specific information and other advice see the installation document.

Basic usage

To check a URL like http://www.example.org/myhomepage/ it is enough to execute:

$ linkchecker http://www.example.org/myhomepage/

This check will validate recursively all pages starting with http://www.example.org/myhomepage/. Additionally, all external links pointing outside of www.example.org will be checked but not recursed into.

Find out more from the manual pages linkchecker and linkcheckerrc.

Features

• recursive and multithreaded checking and site crawling

• output in colored or normal text, HTML, SQL, CSV, XML or a sitemap graph in different formats

• HTTP/1.1, HTTPS, FTP, mailto:, news:, nntp:, Telnet and local file links support

• restriction of link checking with regular expression filters for URLs

• proxy support

• username/password authorization for HTTP and FTP and Telnet

• honors robots.txt exclusion protocol

• Cookie support

• HTML5 support

• Plugin support allowing custom page checks

• Different interfaces: command line and web interface

Screenshots

Commandline interface	WSGI web interface

Test suite status

Linkchecker has extensive unit tests to ensure code quality. GitHub Actions is used for continuous build and test integration.