md-link-checker 1.3

Utility to check url, section reference, and path links in Markdown files

MD-LINK-CHECKER - Utility to check url, section reference, and path links in Markdown files

This is a simple command line utility to check url, section reference, and path links in Markdown files. It iterates through the specified Markdown files and checks each link in the file for validity. If no file is specified then it defaults to checking README.md in the current directory. URL fetches can be slow over the internet so they are checked simultaneously (maximum 10 in parallel per file by default but you can change that using the -p/--parallel-url-checks option). There are a number of similar utilities available so why did I create another one? Well, all those that I tried didn't work!

E.g. check links in the README.md file in the current directory:

$ cd /path/to/my/project
$ md-link-checker

Check links in all the README.md files across your projects:

$ cd ..
$ md-link-checker */README.md

The latest version and documentation is available at https://github.com/bulletmark/md-link-checker.

Installation or Upgrade

Python 3.8 or later is required. md-link-checker is on PyPI so the easiest way to install it is to use uv tool:

$ uv tool install md-link-checker

To upgrade:

$ uv tool upgrade md-link-checker

To uninstall:

$ uv tool uninstall md-link-checker

Command Line Options

Type md-link-checker -h to view the usage summary:

usage: md-link-checker [-h] [-u] [-p PARALLEL_URL_CHECKS] [-f] [-v]
                          [files ...]

Utility to check url, section reference, and path links in Markdown files.

positional arguments:
  files                 one or more markdown files to check, default =
                        "README.md"

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -u, --no-urls         do not check URL links, only check section and path
                        links
  -p, --parallel-url-checks PARALLEL_URL_CHECKS
                        max number of parallel URL checks to perform per file
                        (default=10)
  -f, --no-fail         do not return final error code after failures
  -v, --verbose         print links found in file as they are checked

License

Copyright (C) 2025 Mark Blakeney. This program is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/ for more details.