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

Description and use

DeadLinkFinder verifies Markdown links and GitHub anchors locally, offers fuzzy suggestions, 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 local files, images, and anchors in milliseconds, suggests close matches, and can output SARIF for GitHub PR annotations, enabling reliable documentation integrity checks in CI pipelines.

Workflow

• Run deadlinkfinder against the docs directory or specific Markdown files.
• Review terminal output for errors and suggestions.
• Fix reported issues in the documentation files.
• Re‑run deadlinkfinder to confirm resolution.
• Integrate deadlinkfinder into CI by adding a step that exits on errors or generates a SARIF report for GitHub Code Scanning.

Evidence

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

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

Generate a SARIF report with deterministic line fingerprints: deadlinkfinder . --format sarif --output results.sarif

Source