Django W3C Validator

About

Django W3C Validator is a pluggable Django app that validates all your urls using the W3C validator. It is called via a management command that crawls your domain for all internal links using Mechanize and saves them to a text file to reuse. It then sends each url to the W3C validator and saves the results in an html file to view on your website.

Installation

1. Pip install from GitHub:

    pip install git+git://github.com/racheltwu/django_w3c_validator
   

2. Add django_w3c_validator to your INSTALLED_APPS in your settings file:

    INSTALLED_APPS = (
        ...
        'django_w3c_validator',
        ...
    )
   

3. You can either set the VALIDATOR_START_URL variable in your settings file, or if you already have your domain set in ALLOWED_HOSTS it will pull the first domain from that tuple. VALIDATOR_START_URL has priority, and it doesn't matter if you start with "http://" or not, nor does it matter if you use the ".example.com" method in ALLOWED_HOSTS to include subdomains. Subdomain urls would be considered internal during the crawling process and would be included to be validated.

    VALIDATOR_START_URL = 'example.com'
   

4. Add this url to your urls.py to make your validation results available at http://yourdomain.com/validation. You can view the crawled urls at http://yourdomain.com/validation/urls

    (r'^validation', include('django_w3c_validator.urls')),
   

5. You can disable the javascript collapsing effect by setting VALIDATOR_COLLAPSE to False in your settings. It is True by default.

Usage

Run the managagement command to validate all the internal urls on your site:

    python manage.py validate_html

The command will detect your domain name from your settings file and proceed to crawl it for all internal links, and save all found urls to a text file to use again later. If this file already exists, it will not crawl the site again unless you pass the --crawl option with the command.

Screenshot