check-pages

Checks various aspects of a web page for correctness.

Install

npm install check-pages --save-dev

If you're using Grunt, the grunt-check-pages package wraps this functionality in a Grunt task.

If you're using Gulp or another framework, the example below shows how to integrate check-pages into your workflow.

Overview

An important aspect of creating a web site is validating the structure, content, and configuration of the site's pages. The checkPages task provides an easy way to integrate this testing into your workflow.

By providing a list of pages to scan, the task can:

Validate each page is accessible
Validate all links point to accessible content (similar to the W3C Link Checker)
Validate links with query string file hashes have the expected content
Validate page structure for XHTML compliance (akin to the W3C Markup Validation Service)
Validate a page's response time is below some threshold
Validate a page takes advantage of caching for better performance
Validate a page takes advantage of compression for better performance

Usage

To use check-pages with Gulp, create a task and invoke checkPages, passing the task's callback function. The following example includes all supported options:

var gulp = require("gulp");
var checkPages = require("check-pages");

gulp.task("checkDev", [ "start-development-server" ], function(callback) {
  var options = {
    pageUrls: [
      'http://localhost:8080/',
      'http://localhost:8080/blog',
      'http://localhost:8080/about.html'
    ],
    checkLinks: true,
    onlySameDomain: true,
    queryHashes: true,
    noRedirects: true,
    noLocalLinks: true,
    noEmptyFragments: true,
    linksToIgnore: [
      'http://localhost:8080/broken.html'
    ],
    checkXhtml: true,
    checkCaching: true,
    checkCompression: true,
    maxResponseTime: 200,
    userAgent: 'custom-user-agent/1.2.3',
    summary: true
  };
  checkPages(console, options, callback);
});

gulp.task("checkProd", function(callback) {
  var options = {
    pageUrls: [
      'http://example.com/',
      'http://example.com/blog',
      'http://example.com/about.html'
    ],
    checkLinks: true,
    maxResponseTime: 500
  };
  checkPages(console, options, callback);
});

API

/**
 * Checks various aspects of a web page for correctness.
 *
 * @param {object} host Specifies the environment.
 * @param {object} options Configures the task.
 * @param {function} done Callback function.
 * @returns {void}
 */
module.exports = function(host, options, done) { ... }

Host

Type: Object
Required

Specifies the task environment.

For convenience, console can be passed directly (as in the example above).

log

Type: Function (parameters: String)
Required

Function used to log informational messages.

error

Type: Function (parameters: String)
Required

Function used to log error messages.

Options

Type: Object
Required

Specifies the task configuration.

pageUrls

Type: Array of String
Default value: undefined
Required

pageUrls specifies a list of URLs for web pages the task will check. The list can be empty, but must be present.

URLs can point to local or remote content via the http, https, and file protocols. http and https URLs must be absolute; file URLs can be relative. Some features (for example, HTTP header checks) are not available with the file protocol.

checkLinks

Type: Boolean
Default value: false

Enabling checkLinks causes each link in a page to be checked for validity (i.e., an HTTP HEAD or GET request returns success).

For efficiency, a HEAD request is made first and a successful result validates the link. Because some web servers misbehave, a failed HEAD request is followed by a GET request to definitively validate the link.

The following element/attribute pairs are used to identify links:

a/href
area/href
audio/src
embed/src
iframe/src
img/src
input/src
link/href
object/data
script/src
source/src
track/src
video/src