I Built urldn-link-check — A GitHub Action to Catch Broken Links Before They Reach Production

Documentation is often the last thing developers think about—until a broken link frustrates users or a README sends someone to a 404 page.

I wanted a simple way to automatically verify links in Markdown documentation during CI, so I built urldn-link-check.

It's an open-source GitHub Action and CLI that scans your documentation and reports issues before they're merged.

Features
✅ Detect broken links (404/500)
↪️ Detect redirect chains
🔒 Detect insecure HTTP links
📏 Find overly long URLs
📄 Scan Markdown & MDX files
⚡ Fast concurrent scanning
💬 GitHub PR summaries
📊 JSON & Markdown reports
Installation
npm install -D urldn-link-check

or

npx urldn-link-check .
GitHub Action

• uses: urldn/link-check@v1

That's it.

Every push or pull request can automatically verify your documentation.

Why I Built It

While maintaining documentation, I noticed that broken links often go unnoticed until someone reports them.

Instead of checking them manually, I wanted a lightweight tool that integrates directly into GitHub Actions and fits naturally into a CI workflow.

Open Source

The project is MIT licensed and contributions are welcome.

⭐ GitHub: https://github.com/urldn/link-check

📦 npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/urldn-link-check
https://www.npmjs.com/package/urldn-link-check

This is the first developer tool in the URLDN ecosystem, with more open-source projects planned in the future.

If you have ideas or feedback, I'd love to hear them.