Create markdown-link-checker.yml

[Youssef1313]

Trying to find a good working workflow that detects problem such as the ones being fixed in #20137.

[Youssef1313]

I can't get either of the two workflows I found to work.

@adegeo Any ideas?

[adegeo]

Hrm, not sure? But I dont think this would work anyhow. Does the tool check xref links? Those can be put inside of markdown links: [some link text](xref:api-path)

The build system at least tells us of any non HTTP link AFAIK.

[Youssef1313]

I think xrefs shouldn't be detected as relative link. These actions should only work in relative links. But I can't get them working.

[adegeo]

relative links are already checked and reported on by the build system.

[Youssef1313]

@adegeo The build system assumes the link to be okay if there is a redirection. My intentional here was to catch these early.

For example, a File called A.md was renamed to B.md. Because the build system knows about the redirection in that json file, it assumes any link to A.md as a correct link. But if we could make any of these workflows work, they should report invalid link for A.md.

I just thought about that when I saw @gewarren PRs that fixes things like that. Thought the process would be easier.

But if there is no way to get these workflows working, we can close this.

[adegeo]

The way I got the initial snippets testing working to work was doing it in like your fork first. So I think the workflows only trigger when you're working on the branch they are in. So create branch1 with the workflow configured and ready, then do things in branch2 which has a PR into branch1 where the workflow exists. And I think your trigger needs to be on: pull_request not on: push as you want to test the links of the files when a bad PR comes in, not after it's merged.

[Youssef1313]

@adegeo The work flows indeed was triggered in my fork (they doesn't appear in PR but I can see in my fork). However, they doesn't seem to be doing any good.

One of the workflows (https://github.com/Youssef1313/docs/actions?query=workflow%3A%22Markdown+link+checker%22) passes in 5 minutes, although they should report broken links.

The second one is actually very funny (https://github.com/Youssef1313/docs/actions?query=workflow%3A%22Check+Markdown+links%22), it fails after 6 hours with a timeout 😄

(Am I missing some configuration options? or it's an issue in the workflows themselves)?

[adegeo]

No idea really.. does the workflow work with PRs checking just the files in it? I would look into how to configure that script. A lot of scripts allow you set them up through properties or env variables.

[Youssef1313]

@adegeo I'll try to play with it in my fork and see if I could get something to work. In the meanwhile, I'll close the PR and re-open if I could get to something working.