Lychee

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⚡ A fast, async, stream-based link checker written in Rust ⚡
Finds broken hyperlinks and mail addresses in websites and Markdown, HTML, and other file formats!
Available as command-line utility, library and GitHub Action.

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Table of Contents

• Development
• Installation
• Features
• Commandline usage
• Supported file formats
• Library usage
• GitHub Action Usage
• Pre-commit Usage
• Contributing to lychee
• Troubleshooting and Workarounds
• Users
• Credits
• License

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Development

After installing Rust use Cargo for building and testing. For Nix we provide a flake so you can use nix develop and nix build.

Installation

<details><summary><b>View installation instructions</b></summary>

Arch Linux

pacman -S lychee

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed

zypper in lychee

Ubuntu

snap install lychee

Alpine Linux

 # available for Alpine Edge in testing repositories
apk add lychee

macOS

Via Homebrew:

brew install lychee

Via MacPorts:

sudo port install lychee

Docker

docker pull lycheeverse/lychee

Nix

nix-shell -p lychee

Or let Nix even check a packaged site with testers.lycheeLinkCheck { site = …; }

FreeBSD

pkg install lychee

Termux

pkg install lychee

Conda

conda install lychee -c conda-forge

Windows

Via scoop:

scoop install lychee

Via WinGet:

winget install --id lycheeverse.lychee

Via Chocolatey:

choco install lychee

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Pre-built binaries

We provide binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows for every release.
You can download them from the releases page.

Cargo

Build dependencies

On APT/dpkg-based Linux distros (e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Kali Linux) the following commands will install all required build dependencies, including the Rust toolchain and cargo:

curl -sSf 'https://sh.rustup.rs' | sh
apt install gcc pkg-config libc6-dev libssl-dev

Compile and install lychee

cargo install lychee

Feature flags

Lychee supports the following feature flags:

• email-check enables checking email addresses using the mailify-lib crate.
• check_example_domains allows checking example domains such as example.com. This feature is useful for testing.

By default, email-check is enabled. Note that in the past lychee could be configured to use either OpenSSL or Rustls. It was decided to fully switch to Rustls and drop OpenSSL support. Please tell us if this this negatively affects you in any way.

Features

This comparison is made on a best-effort basis. Please create a PR to fix outdated information.

| | lychee | [awesome_bot] | [muffet] | [broken-link-checker] | [linkinator] | [linkchecker] | [markdown-link-check] | [fink] | | -------------------- | ------- | ------------- | -------- | --------------------- | ------------ | -------------------- | --------------------- | ------ | | Language | Rust | Ruby | Go | JS | TypeScript | Python | JS | PHP | | Async/Parallel | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![yes] | | JSON output | ![yes] | ![no] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![maybe]¹ | ![yes] | ![yes] | | Static binary | ![yes] | ![no] | ![yes] | ![no] | ![no] | ️![no] | ![no] | ![no] | | Markdown files | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![no] | ![no] | ![no] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![no] | | HTML files | ![yes] | ![no] | ![no] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![no] | ![yes] | ![no] | | Text files | ![yes] | ![no] | ![no] | ![no] | ![no] | ![no] | ![no] | ![no] | | Website support | ![yes] | ![no] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![no] | ![yes] | | Chunked encodings | ![yes] | ![maybe] | ![maybe] | ![maybe] | ![maybe] | ![no] | ![yes] | ![yes] | | GZIP compression | ![yes] | ![maybe] | ![maybe] | ![yes] | ![maybe] | ![yes] | ![maybe] | ![no] | | Basic Auth | ![yes] | ![no] | ![no] | ![yes] | ![no] | ![yes] | ![no] | ![no] | | Custom user agent | ![yes] | ![no] | ![no] | ![yes] | ![no] | ![yes] | ![no] | ![no] | | Relative URLs | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![no] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![yes] | | Anchors/Fragments | ![yes] | ![no] | ![no] | ![no] | ![no] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![no] | | Include patterns | ![yes]️ | ![yes] | ![no] | ![yes] | ![no] | ![no] | ![no] | ![no] | | Exclude patterns | ![yes] | ![no] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![yes] | | Handle redirects | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![yes] | | Ignore insecure SSL | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![no] | ![no] | ![yes] | ![no] | ![yes] | | File globbing | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![no] | ![no] | ![yes] | ![no] | ![yes] | ![no] | | Limit scheme | ![yes] | ![no] | ![no] | ![yes] | ![no] | ![yes] | ![no] | ![no] | | [Custom headers] | ![yes] | ![no] | ![yes] | ![no] | ![no] | ![no] | ![yes] | ![yes] | | Summary | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![maybe] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![no] | ![yes] | | HEAD requests | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![no] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![no] | ![no] | | Colored output | ![yes] | ![maybe] | ![yes] | ![maybe] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![no] | ![yes] | | [Filter status code] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![no] | ![no] | ![no] | ![no] | ![yes] | ![no] | | Custom timeout | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![no] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![no] | ![yes] | | E-mail links | ![yes] | ![no] | ![no] | ![no] | ![no] | ![yes] | ![no] | ![no] | | Progress bar | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![no] | ![no] | ![no] | ![yes] | ![yes] | ![yes] | | Retry and backoff | ![yes