Keep your URLs healthy using Github Actions and Go

Dead links, huh!. Too many dead links? How do I test a bunch of URLs? Don’t worry I got you, I recently release areyouok a nice, portable and easy to use URL Auditor. Its built using Go and leverages go routines (literally the best form of concurrency).

One handy thing with AreYouOk is that its a standalone binary, so you don’t need any package managers like npm or pip to install it.

• Linux (amd64)

  curl -LJO https://github.com/Bhupesh-V/areyouok/releases/latest/download/areyouok-linux-amd64
  

• MacOS (amd64)

  curl -LJO https://github.com/Bhupesh-V/areyouok/releases/latest/download/areyouok-darwin-amd64
  

• Windows

  curl -LJO https://github.com/Bhupesh-V/areyouok/releases/latest/download/areyouok-windows-amd64.exe
  

Or you can just directly download them from releases

Once that’s done, check if you have the latest version installed

$ ./areyouok-linux-amd64 --version
AreYouOk v1.1.0 built on (26 Jan 2021)

Using it is pretty straight-forward, AreYouOk accepts 3 optional arguments followed by a directory path

1. -t type of files to scan for links
   The default value has been set to Markdown since a lot of OSS documentation & personal blogs are written in markdown these days. You can also scan HTML, or literally any valid text file!!

2. -i list of files or directories to ignore for links (node_modules, .git)
   This is handy if you are sure that certain files or directories won’t contain any URLs, plus this makes areyouok work quickly too!

3. -r type of report to generate (available formats include json, html, txt & github)
   The most superior format is HTML which gives a visual perspective on all the URLs scanned (you can see this in the blog header as well)
   

OK! Enough talking, lets see it in action on my til repository

$ areyouok-linux-amd64 -i=_layouts,.git,_site,README.md,build.py,USAGE.md -r=txt ~/Documents/til/

We are ignoring folders: _layouts, .git, _site & files README.md, USAGE.md & build.py using the i flag.

The r flag is used to specify the type of report to generate.

Here is a demo

This is good but a more precise to use AreYouOk is by adding it in your CI/CD workflow.

Create a Github Action workflow in your repository with following contents

name: Audit Links using AreYouOk
on:
  workflow_dispatch:
  schedule:
    # At 06:00 AM, every 30 days
    - cron:  '0 6 */30 * *'
      
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Download & Run AreYouOk
        run: |
          wget -q https://github.com/Bhupesh-V/areyouok/releases/latest/download/areyouok-linux-amd64
          chmod +x areyouok-linux-amd64
          ./areyouok-linux-amd64 -i=_layouts,.git,_site,README.md,build.py,USAGE.md -r=github
      - name: Create Issue
        uses: peter-evans/create-issue-from-file@v2
        with:
          title: AreYouOk URL Health Report
          content-filepath: ./report.github
      - name: Cleanup
        run: rm report.github

Our workflow will execute every 30 days then downloads a fresh copy of areyouok using curl & executes it inside the repo. Note the report format is github here. Its largely HTML but is compatible with GitHub’s commonmark markdown renderer.

Make sure you set the executable permissions on areyouok once downloaded

Our action uses the peter-evans/create-issue-from-file action which is used to report back the results to user via github issues. This is how it looks like

You can see the generated issue here. Also the Action Summary

And there you have it, no more dead 💀️ links!