Markdown Links

Index

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Summary
• 3. Instructions

1. Introduction

Markdown is a lightweight markup language very popular among programmers. It is used in many platforms that manipulate text (GitHub, forums, blogs, etc.) and it's very common to find files in this format in any repository (the traditional README.md, to begin with).

Markdown files usually contain links that may be broken, or that might just not be valid any longer, harming the value of the information there presented.

An open source community proposed to Laboratoria to create a tool, using Node.js, that reads and analyse Markdown files, to verify the files which contain links and show some statistics.

2. Summary

In this project, a command line interface (CLI) tool was created, as well as its library in Javascript.

Staying away from the browser to build a program to be executed through Node.js. Learning about processes (process.env, process.argv, ...), how to interact with file systems, make http queries, etc.

Node.js is an execution environment for JavaScript built with Chrome's V8 Javascript engine. It will allow us to run JavaScript in our operational system, baing it in our computer or on a server, which opens the gates to allow us to interact with systems, files, networks, etc.

Developing your own library is an essential experience to any developer, compelling you to think about the interface (API) of your modules and how it will be used by other developers.

3. Instructions

3.1 Install

To install this API, you should provide your command line the following command:

npm i @silversantos/md-links

This library requires a Node.js version that equals or is upper than v18.16.0.

3.2 Commands

After installing, you can run it with the folllowing commands:

3.2.1 To read a file or directory

md-links directory-or-file.md

With this command, you will receive a list of all the links containing in you file or directory.

3.2.2 To verify which links are valid

Run md-links directory-or-file.md --validate to receive the http querie response. It will return you in your command line a list of each link in the directory or file and tell you if the links are ok or not.

3.2.3 To receive statistics

The command md-links directory-or-file.md --stats will provide you statistics of how many links are there in the given directory or file and how many of them are unique.

If you'd like to verify how many of them are broken, you may run md-links directory-or-file.md --validate --stats