Catch Broken Markdown Links and #Anchors Offline Before They Hit Production with DeadLinkFinder

Description and use

DeadLinkFinder validates Markdown links and GitHub anchors offline, suggests fixes, and outputs SARIF for CI integration.

Problem

Documentation changes often leave dead relative links and broken GitHub‑style heading anchors that are hard to detect in code reviews.

Outcome

DeadLinkFinder identifies missing files and anchors in milliseconds, suggests close matches, and outputs SARIF for GitHub integration, enabling automated documentation integrity checks in CI pipelines.

Workflow

• Install DeadLinkFinder via pip
• Run deadlinkfinder against target directories or files
• Review terminal output or generated SARIF/JSON for errors and suggestions
• Fix reported issues in documentation
• Re‑run to confirm resolution

Evidence

DeadLinkFinder uses only the Python standard library (re, pathlib, difflib, urllib), meaning zero external dependencies to audit or maintain.

Source

Run it against any directory or Markdown file: deadlinkfinder docs/ README.md

Source

Example terminal output: $ deadlinkfinder docs/ 🔍 DeadLinkFinder - Verifying documentation integrity... [!] DLF-001 ERROR docs/getting-started.md:28 Target not found: '../guides/setup.md' Suggestion: Did you mean '../guides/install-setup.md'?

Source