URL validation

[bkmgit]

It would be helpful to validate links that are created by pkgdown and issue a warning if a link cannot be found. Many static site generators do this and it makes site generation and maintenance easier.

[jayhesselberth]

This would be easy if we took a dependency on urlchecker.

[hadley]

Hmmmm, urlchecker does check the .Rd and .Rmd files, but won't check any links that you've added other ways (e.g. in _pkgdown.yml). It's also designed to meet CRANs needs, where you have to resolve redirects. If you're not submitting to CRAN, that's not that useful; and if you are submitting to CRAN, you'll get the checks as part of R CMD check anyway. And we already recommend urlchecker it in our release process (since it's much faster than the built-in method.

So maybe there's nothing to do here?

[maelle]

For info, for some (not pkgdown) websites I've seen https://github.com/lycheeverse/lychee-action used

[hadley]

I think that adds to my belief that this isn't pkgdown's responsibility since there are other tools that can do it better (urlchecker as part of the release process will tell you the source of the urls, and lychee or similar will be much faster).