Excluding Paths

lychee respects ‘.gitignore’ and ‘.ignore’ files by default. This way you normally don’t have to manually exclude directories such as .git, node_modules or vendor. This default behavior can be disabled with --no-ignore. Additionally, lychee ignores hidden files by default. To traverse hidden directories and check hidden files use --hidden.

Sometimes it is necessary to skip specific paths from being checked. You might think that you can just put the path in the .lycheeignore file, but that won’t work. The .lycheeignore file is used for excluding URLs, not paths (same as the --exclude option).

Instead, you can use the --exclude-path flag to exclude paths from being checked. The values are treated as regular expressions. For example you can use --exclude-path '(^|/)test\.md$' to exclude all files called exactly test.md. Note that using --exclude-path 'test.md' would also exclude files like docs/test-md/intro.txt and testamd.html.

Alternatively, you can also use the exclude_path key in the configuration file:

lychee.toml

exclude_path = [
    "\\.txt$",      # skip .txt extensions
    "(^|/)test/",   # skip directories named "test"
    "[aeiouAEIOU]", # exclude paths containing vowels
]

Here is an example config file.