Linksta

Link checker for BBC Radio & Music sites.

The idea is to quickly check a page for broken links by doing a status check on all the relative URL's on the page.

There are 4 parts to this tool, the URL, the base URL, the regex and the filename.

  • URL is the page that you want to check for broken links, e.g www.bbc.co.uk/radi04
  • Base URL is used with the relative URL from the regex to create a full URL, e.g www.bbc.co.uk
  • Regex is the point of the URL that you want to keep from the regex, e.g bbc.co.uk/radio/new, specifying /radio would create /radio/new.
  • Filename is markdown (.md) file where all the page links are stored, this can be useful for manual checks, e.g file.md

Installation

gem install linksta

Usage

Command Line

linksta check <url> <base_url> <regex> <filename>

Examples

linksta check http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio radio.md

linksta check http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/15/year-of-code-needs-reboot-teachers http://theguardian.com /technology news.md

Output

Once running, you'll see either a 200 with Status is 200 for <URL> or Status is NOT GOOD for <URL>.

Script It

require 'linksta'

url = 'http://www.live.bbc.co.uk/radio'
base = 'http://www.live.bbc.co.uk'
reg = '/radio'
filename = 'radio.md'

page = Linksta::SaveLinks.new(url, filename)
status = Linksta::CheckResponse.new(url, base, reg, filename)

page.capture_links
status.check_links

From a File

If you have a lot of URLs that you want to check all the time using from a file is an alternative option. This will utilise the smoke option, then point to a YAML file with the extension. In some situations, we are deploying applications that we don't want public facing, so ensuring they 404 is essential. There is a status code option to allow a specific status code to be set against a group of URL's, ensuring builds fail if the right code conditions are met.

linksta smoke test.yaml

Example YAML Config:

base: 'http://www.bbc.co.uk'

concurrency: 100

headers:
 -
   X-content-override: 'https://example.com'

status_code: 200

paths:
  - /radio
  - /radio/new

Via a Ruby script:

require 'linksta'

tests = Linksta::Checker.new("path/to.yaml")
tests.smoke