pytest-check-links

pytest plugin that checks URLs for HTML-containing files.

Supported files

• .html
• .rst
• .md (TODO: select renderer)
• .ipynb (requires nbconvert)

Install

pip install pytest-check-links

Use

pytest --check-links mynotebook.ipynb

Configure

--links-ext

default: md,rst,html,ipynb

A comma-separated list of extensions to check

--check-anchors

Also check whether links with #anchors HTML files (either local, or with served with html in the Content-Type) actually exist, and point to exactly one named anchor.

--check-links-ignore

A regular expression that matches URIs that should not be checked. Can be specified multiple times for multiple ignore patterns. This can be used for files that have a lot of links to GitHub pages, such as a Changelog. GitHub has rate limiting, which would normally cause these files to take up to an hour to complete for larger repositories. For example:

pytest --check-links --check-links-ignore "https://github.com/.*/pull/.*" CHANGELOG.md

Cache

Caching requires the installation of requests-cache.

pip install requests-cache

If enabled, each occurance of a link will be checked, no matter how many times it appears in a collection of files to check.

--check-links-cache

Cache requests when checking links. Caching is disabled by default, and this option must be provided, even if other cache configuration options are provided.

--check-links-cache-name

default: .pytest-check-links-cache

Name of link cache, either the base name of a file or similar, depending on backend.

--check-links-cache-backend

default: sqlite3

Cache persistence backend. The other known backends are:

• memory
• redis
• mongodb

See the requests-cache documentation for more information.

--check-links-cache-expire-after

default: None (unlimited)

Time to cache link responses (seconds).

--check-links-cache-backend-opt

Backend-specific options for link cache, provided as key:value. These are passed directly to the requests_cache.CachedSession constructor, as they vary depending on the backend.

Values will be parsed as JSON first, so to overload the default of caching all HTTP response codes (which requires a list of ints):

--check-links-backend-opt allowable_codes:[200]

Code Styling

pytest-check-links has adopted automatic code formatting so you shouldn't need to worry too much about your code style. As long as your code is valid, the pre-commit hook should take care of how it should look. You can invoke the pre-commit hook by hand at any time with:

pre-commit run

which should run any autoformatting on your code and tell you about any errors it couldn't fix automatically. You may also install black integration into your text editor to format code automatically.

If you have already committed files before setting up the pre-commit hook with pre-commit install, you can fix everything up using pre-commit run --all-files. You need to make the fixing commit yourself after that.

Some of the hooks only run on CI by default, but you can invoke them by running with the --hook-stage manual argument.

TODO

• pick a markdown renderer (probably commonmark) or make the markdown renderer pluggable
• options for validating links (allow absolute links, only remote or local, etc.)
• find URLs in Python docstrings