pa11y hard to use from non-internet connected machines

[tomduckering]

Hi,

Thanks for making pa11y. We're trying to use it for our project but since we have machines with no internet connectivity we have to jump through some hoops to make HTMLCS.js available to download via HTTP.

Is there a reason you're not just including this js file in your code or is there a reason it can't be fetched from a local file system?

Happy to try and make a fix but wanted to understand if there were some reasons for this not being possible.

Thanks,

Tom

[rowanmanning]

Hi Tom,

Thanks for bringing this up.

We did look at keeping a copy locally briefly but it wasn't a big priority for our use-case. I'd be interested in merging if you wanted to work on this, but we're currently building the next major version of pa11y (no ETA yet) which no longer uses HTML CodeSniffer, so I don't have much time to dedicate to writing a fix myself.

Rowan

[whymarrh]

@tomduckering This is probably what you're referring to, but in the event that it isn't:

You can supply the -c or --htmlcs flag to pa11y and have it load a different URL for HTML_CodeSniffer. For example:

$ wget http://squizlabs.github.io/HTML_CodeSniffer/build/HTMLCS.js
$ # Or alternatively `curl -O`
$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer
$ # Or put it on a server that your machines have access to

And run pa11y like so: pa11y --htmlcs localhost:8000/HTMLCS.js example.com.

I do agree though that this is jumping through hoops.

@rowanmanning Will v2.0 be open source?

[rowanmanning]

@whymarrh absolutely! Alpha stages at the moment, but was planning to get some early feedback from you at some point. Public roadmap should hopefully appear soon

[rowanmanning]

Marking this as resolved – you can achieve this from an offline machine in the way that @whymarrh specified for now. In the next version of pa11y, I'm considering moving to a locally-hosted version of HTML CodeSniffer by default which will make this much easier in future.