Overview
What is lychee?
Section titled “What is lychee?”Lychee is a fast, async link checker written in Rust. It finds broken hyperlinks and mail addresses in your Markdown and HTML files, codebases, and websites. It’s simple, lightweight, and easy to use. It is perfect for checking documentation, blogs, and static sites, and can be easily integrated into CI/CD pipelines.
Why was lychee created?
Section titled “Why was lychee created?”lychee was born out of a personal need. Matthias, the original author, maintains a repository for static code analysis tools on Github. The links to the tools regularly broke, so he decided to add a link checker to the repo, to get notified. Unfortunately the existing solutions were either too slow, deprecated, or were lacking functionality. So he decided to write a link checker himself — how hard could it be?
A few years later, he reached a point where 10% of the functionality works most of the time and the result is called lychee.
Trivia
Section titled “Trivia”Project Name
Section titled “Project Name”The name lychee is a play on link checker. Originally we wanted to call it liche, but that name was already used by a link checker written in Go (which has since been deprecated).
Original Motivation
Section titled “Original Motivation”Matthias live-coded the first version of lychee in an episode of Hello Rust. You can watch it below.
Why should I use lychee?
Section titled “Why should I use lychee?”- Speed: lychee is built with Rust and designed for speed, making it perfect for large projects.
- Markdown & HTML Support: lychee natively supports Markdown and HTML files, making it ideal for documentation and websites.
- Static Binary: lychee is distributed as a single static binary, making installation and updates a breeze.
- JSON Output: Easily integrate lychee into your CI/CD pipelines with structured JSON output.
- Asynchronous: lychee uses asynchronous requests to check links, making it faster and more efficient than traditional link checkers.
- Customizable: lychee offers a wide range of configuration options to tailor the link checking process to your needs.
- Open Source: lychee is open source and welcomes contributions from the community.