Site Validator Gem

site_validator is the free, open source version of the popular Site Validator app.

Just pass it your site's URL and it will crawl it and validate its HTML for you, generating a comprehensive report of all errors found.

For advanced features like CSS validation, deep-link crawling, results storing and team collaborations, check the awesome Site Validator.

Installation

site_validator is a Ruby gem that can be installed on the usual way. If you haven't Ruby installed on your system, check out RVM for OSX or GNU/Linux, and RubyInstaller for Windows.

gem install site_validator

Usage

Pass it a starting URL to be checked, and the filename where you want your report to be generated, like:

site_validator http://validationhell.com report.html

This will validate all the internal URLs found on the starting URL, up to a maximum of 250 URLs, and generate an HTML file with the full report.

You can pass site_validator an XML sitemap or the URL of a website; it will scrape it in search of URLs to validate.

Timeouts

By default, site_validator will set a 20 seconds timeout for each individual request. If you want to set a different timeout, pass it as a third parameter like this:

site_validator http://validationhell.com report.html 60

Using an alternate validation server

By default, site_validator will use the official W3C Validator server at http://validator.w3.org but you can use an alternate server if you want. To do this, define an environment variable on your machine, like:

ENV['W3C_MARKUP_VALIDATOR_URI'] = 'http://example.com/validator'

Follow this guide to know how to setup your own validation server: https://github.com/tlvince/w3c-validator-guide

Notes:

This gem requires Ruby 1.9, and has been tested on Ruby 1.9.2-p0

License:

This is a free, open source project with a MIT license. See the file MIT-LICENSE for details.