root-relative links ignored with default config about lychee HOT 6 OPEN

To add my two cents here, although I think a README change is probably sufficient, it seems like there could be some type of enhancement that would at least let users know that root-level files were discovered and skipped. Even if that were only shown in a debug or verbose mode, that'd be fine and probably enough to point users in the right direction. My expectation as a user of lychee is that there's some setting which will tell me absolutely every link lychee "saw" and what its disposition is. Even if the --base . flag isn't set, it's still a genuine link. I'd want to be told what it did or didn't do about it.

from lychee.

Yes, absolutely. Pull requests to lychee-action (and possibly lychee) to clarify the behavior would be very welcome. I'm too involved in the tool creation to make this an easy task for me, as it's kinda obvious by now, but of course that's just Stockholm syndrome. 😆

from lychee.

FYI: moved the issue to the lychee main repo, because it's a better fit there.

from lychee.

Thanks for the thorough analysis.

Yes, --base . is currently the suggested way. Making it the default would make your case work, but break another case:
If the input is https://example.com and we find a link such as /about on that page, we assume it is pointing to https://example.com/about, which is a sensible assumption.

However, setting --base to . by default conflicts with that.
That's because we set the base from the source URL if --base is not set.
#358

If we change that behavior, we have to track (or infer) whether the source is a directory path or a URL. Sounds straightforward, but there are edge-cases like /about, which could be either a path or a URL relative to the domain root — depending on the context.

I do think that this can be resolved, it just requires more research and thorough testing to avoid any future surprises. I would love to get some help on this by mapping out all cases and maybe writing some tests.
For now, --base . avoids any ambiguities, at the cost of false negatives if the parameter isn't used.

from lychee.

Thanks for triaging this mre.
It makes sense that completely ignoring the link is a bug for this repo.

Would it make sense to add some small description to the README of the lychee-action repo so that others are aware they should add --base . when testing against local files rather than a server? It can be pretty non-obvious when it checks a few hundred links that a few were quietly skipped over.

from lychee.

Fair. As a first step we could print the ignored potential links in verbose mode.

from lychee.