Weird/incorrect behaviour when checking local links

[fenuks]

I'm using lychee 0.15.1 on Arch Linux.

Here is an example markdown document:

# Incorrect or strange behaviour
## Links not being checked
- [ ] [Test1](~/Downloads/not checked because of space)
- [ ] [Test3](/home/nonsense/not-checked2-absolute-path)

## Links checking not working because of tilde
- [Test4](~/incorrect-check)
<!-- ✗ [ERR] file:///home/me/Documents/~/incorrect-check | Failed: Cannot find file -->

# Links checked correctly
- [Test5](./correct-check)
<!-- ✗ [ERR] file:///home/me/Documents/correct-check | Failed: Cannot find file -->

$ lychee test.md 
  2/2 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Finished extracting links                                                             Issues found in 1 input. Find details below.

[test.md]:
✗ [ERR] file:///home/fenuks/Dokumenty/notatki/correct-check | Failed: Cannot find file
✗ [ERR] file:///home/fenuks/Dokumenty/notatki/~/incorrect-check | Failed: Cannot find file

🔍 2 Total (in 0s) ✅ 0 OK 🚫 2 Errors

It seems that lychee skips links with absolute path or spaces, and it doesn't handle links with ~ as absolute links.

[mre]

Hey, apologies for the late response and thanks for creating the issue.

We don't expand ~ at the moment. I think that's architecture-specific? E.g. if you ran the website on a Windows server, would it handle that case correctly?

As for the absolute path /home/nonsense/not-checked2-absolute-path, I'm guessing you were expecting that lychee expects that file to exist in your filesystem root (i.e. in your /home folder).
However, lychee cannot know what the root directory of your server is. You might run your side from a subdirectory (e.g. https://example.com/blog).

In 0.18.0, you can tell lychee what the root directory is with

lychee --root-dir / test.md

What's left to do is

• Expand ~ to $HOME (only on Unix).
• Fix links with spaces.

[fenuks]

Hello, none apologies needed about response time. ;)

We don't expand ~ at the moment. I think that's architecture-specific? E.g. if you ran the website on a Windows server, would it handle that case correctly?

As far I know, yes, but I don't use Windows.

In 0.18.0, you can tell lychee what the root directory is with

lychee --root-dir / test.md

Thank you! I didn't consider HTTP server root dir use case. Myself, I mostly want to check links in my notes that are consumed directly off-disk, so no HTTP server is involved.

[mre]

I did some research and can't find any reference which says that ~ gets expanded to the home directory on Windows servers (including IIS). So before we make that change, let's find a resource first. Otherwise, we'd end up implementing non-existent functionality and generate false-positives. 😉