PyAnchor

Dead links are an annoyance for websites with an extensive amount of content. A side from the negative impact on SEO, dead links are an annoyance for any user that clicks on one.

PyAnchor is primarily for checking the HTTP response on all links on a page. You can integrate it into your development workflow so that users never see a 404 in the first place.

Install

Requires Python 3.10 and above.

It is recommended that you install this package in a virtual or isolated environment. The easiest way to do this is with pipx.

pipx install pyanchor

Alternatively, you can install it with pip into your virtual environment:

MacOS / Linux:

python3 -m pip install pyanchor

Windows:

python -m pip install pyanchor

Using the CLI

The CLI can be invoked with the pyanchor command. A URL must be provided unless it's the help page.

To get the help page:

pyanchor --help

Basic example for a single page:

Note: all provided URLs must include a valid HTTP scheme.

pyanchor https://mysite.com/

If you want to check all links on a website, and not just a single page, a sitemap.xml URL may be provided and flagged with --sitemap.

Example:

pyanchor https://mysite.com/sitemap.xml --sitemap

By default, successful requests are not printed to the terminal. To see all urls with a 200 response add the --verbose flag.

pyanchor https://mysite.com --verbose

pyanchor https://mysite.com/sitemap.xml --sitemap --verbose

If you wish the output the results to a csv file, instead of to the terminal (default), then you may wish to use the --output-csv flag:

pyanchor https://mysite.com --output-csv output/path/to/file

But wait, there's more...

To integrate PyAnchor into your application, you can import the LinkResults class. LinkResults requires a URL.

Example:

>>> from pyanchor.link_checker import LinkResults
>>> r = LinkResults("https://mysite.com/")
>>> r.results
{200: ["https://mysite.com/about/", "https://mysite.com/contact/"], 500: ["https://mysite.com/doh!/"]}

As you can see the results attribute is a dictionary containing all response codes returned as a dictionary key, with a list of URLs that achieve that response code as the dictionary value.

Analyzing Links

PyAnchor give you the ability to use the LinkAnalysis class to check the links in a given URL for unsafe and obsolete attributes.

To check for obsolete attributes use the obsolete_attrs property:

>>> from pyanchor.link_checker import LinkAnalysis
>>> r = LinkAnalysis("https://mysite.com/")
>>> r.obsolete_attrs
{'/about/link-1': ['charset', 'rev'], '/about/link-2': ['name']}

Likewise you can check for unsafe linkes with unsafe_attrs:

>>> from pyanchor.link_checker import LinkAnalysis
>>> r = LinkAnalysis("https://mysite.com/")
>>> r.unsafe_attrs
{<a href="/about/link-4" target="_blank">Link 4</a>: True, <a href="/about/link-5" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">Link 5</a>: False}

Any link that does not include rel="noopener" when the target attribute is used will return True. As in, it is True that this link is unsafe. Therfore, links with appropriate attributes will return False.

Feedback

If you find a bug, please file an issue.

If you have feature requests, please file an issue and use the appropriate label.

Support

If you would like to show your support for the project, you can sponsor me on GitHub? 🤓

How to Contribute

Please raise an issue before making a PR, so that the issue and implementation can be discussed before you write any code. This will save you time, and increase the chances of your PR being merged without significant changes.

Please make PR's on a new branch, and not on main/master.

Please include tests for any PR's that include code (unless current tests cover your code contribution).

Please add documentation for any new features or flags.

Contributors

Thank you to:

• Zingzy for PR #55
• mrbazzan for PR #25
• Icelain for PR #11
• wevnasc for PR #8
• muditshamz for PR #6