Run node-simple-crawler to discover broken links on your website.

If you haven't used grunt before, be sure to check out the Getting Started guide, as it explains how to create a gruntfile as well as install and use grunt plugins. Once you're familiar with that process, install this plugin with this command:

npm install grunt-link-checker --save-dev

Then add this line to your project's Gruntfile.js gruntfile:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-link-checker');

grunt-link-checker will by default find any broken internal links on the given site and will also find broken fragment identifiers by using cheerio to ensure that an element exists with the given identifier. You can figure more options that are available via node-simplecrawler.

The minimal usage of grunt-link-checker runs with a site specified and an optional options.initialPort:

linkChecker: {
  dev: {
    site: 'localhost',
    options: {
      initialPort: 9001
    }
  }
}

In addition to the above config which tests a local version of your site before deployment, you can add an additional target to run post-deployment. This will verify that your assets were deployed correctly and are being resolved correctly after any revisioning or path modifications during deployment:

linkChecker: {
  // Use a large amount of concurrency to speed up check
  options: {
    maxConcurrency: 20
  },
  dev: {
    site: 'localhost',
    options: {
      initialPort: 9001
    }
  },
  postDeploy: {
    site: 'mysite.com'
  }
}

Type: Boolean
Default: false

Set this to true to speed up your test by not verfiying fragment identifiers.

Type: Function

Function that receives the instantiated crawler object so that you can add events or other listeners/config to the crawler.

Here is an example config using the callback option to ignore localhost links which have different ports:

linkChecker: {
  dev: {
    site: 'localhost',
    options: {
      initialPort: 9001,
      callback: function (crawler) {
        crawler.addFetchCondition(function (url) {
          return url.port === '9001';
        });
      }
    }
  }
}

Type: Object

Give the possibility to generate a report of tests. These can be generated as json and / or xml files (compatible with Jenkins)

Here is an example config using the resultFiles option:

resultFiles: {
  json: "reports/TEST-url-checker.json",
  xml: "reports/TEST-url-checker.xml"
}

Every option specified in the node-simplecrawler is available:

https://github.com/cgiffard/node-simplecrawler#configuring-the-crawler

• 0.1.0 - Updated dependencies, changed task name to linkChecker.
• 0.0.6 - Added logging for initially fetched URL and logged status codes for failed fetches.
• 0.0.5 - Added error reporting if initial site URL fails.
• 0.0.4 - Added callback option.
• 0.0.3 - Fixed repo link in package.json and fixed error reporting for a failed initial URL.
• 0.0.2 - Added noFragment flag.
• 0.0.1 - Check to make sure # URLs resolve to content with a corresponding ID.
• 0.0.0 - Initial release.