Markdown Link Checker Action

Reusable GitHub Action (Bash-only checker) for Markdown links.

It reports and optionally fails on:

• 404
• redirect_to_404 (initial response is 3xx, final resolved response is 404)
• 402 and 403
• any 5xx

The action generates a Markdown table report with:

• file path
• line number
• original URL
• final URL after redirects
• HTTP status
• issue type

Usage In Another Repository

name: Markdown Link Check

on:
  schedule:
    # Every Monday at 08:00 UTC
    - cron: '0 8 * * 1'
  pull_request:
    paths:
      - '**/*.md'
      - '**/*.markdown'
  push:
    paths:
      - '**/*.md'
      - '**/*.markdown'
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  links:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Run markdown link checker action
        id: link_check
        uses: academic/link-checker@v1
        with:
          report-file: link-check-results.md
          fail-on-issue: "true"

      - name: Upload report artifact
        if: always()
        uses: actions/upload-artifact@v4
        with:
          name: markdown-link-check-report
          path: ${{ steps.link_check.outputs.report-file }}

Inputs

• report-file: output report path. Default: link-check-results.md
• fail-on-issue: whether to fail the job when issues are found. Default: "true"
• user-agent: User-Agent for HTTP requests. Default: markdown-link-check-github-action

Outputs

• checked-count: number of links checked
• issue-count: number of matching issues found
• report-file: generated report path

Notes

• This repository should be tagged (for example v1) before external usage.
• Example tagging commands:

git tag -a v1 -m "Release v1"
git push origin v1