feat(docs): check external links on a schedule, and fix the nine that were dead - #44
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… were dead The neptune.ai breakage in #39 was found by a reader, not by the repository. A course is mostly links to other people's work, and nothing here noticed when one of them rotted. A full lychee run over the README and every chapter found nine genuinely dead links besides the neptune ones: - three of this project's own MLOps Community articles, which moved to /blog/<slug> when that site restructured - Microsoft Learn's VS Code module, VS Code Live Share, Jupyter Book's cell hiding page, ZenML's starter guide, the OpenRAIL announcement, and Marquez, all moved or renamed - Censius, whose TLS handshake now fails outright; the two explainability definitions it backed now point at Molnar's Interpretable Machine Learning `check:links` is deliberately NOT part of `check`. The first run reported 63 failures against 706 unique URLs, and only 9 were real: 37 were HTTP 429 and 14 were bot-blocking 403s from hosts that serve a reader fine. A gate that cries wolf 85% of the time teaches people to ignore it. It runs monthly and on demand from links.yml instead, with a .lycheeignore for the hosts that refuse scanners and 429 accepted as proof a host is alive rather than evidence it is broken. The whole set now reports 0 errors.
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Follow-up to #43.
Why
#39 was a reader telling us a link was dead. A course is mostly links to other people's work, and nothing in this repository noticed when one rotted. So I ran the check we did not have.
A full
lycheesweep over the README and every chapter found nine genuinely dead links beyond the neptune ones — including three of this project's own MLOps Community articles.What was dead
mlops.community/<slug>/blog/<slug>docs.microsoft.com/.../use-vscodecode.visualstudio.com/learn/collaboration/live-sharevisualstudio.microsoft.comjupyterbook.org/interactive/hiding.htmldocs.zenml.io/user-guide/...user-guide→user-guideslicenses.ai/blog/.../bigscience-open-rail-m-licensemarquezproject.github.iomarquezproject.aicensius.ai(2 links)Why
check:linksis not incheckThe first run reported 63 failures against 706 unique URLs, and only 9 were real: 37 were HTTP 429 and 14 were bot-blocking 403s from hosts that serve a reader perfectly well. Putting that in the commit gate would teach everyone to ignore a red check — the opposite of what a gate is for.
So it runs monthly and on demand from
links.yml, with:.lycheeignorefor hosts that refuse scanners (Medium, Read the Docs, Reddit, LinkedIn) and for illustrativelocalhostURLs in the prose;--accept 200..=299,429, because a host that rate-limits a scanner is a host that is up — treating that as a failure reports the opposite of what the check exists to find.Test plan
mise run check:links— 0 errors across 706 unique links (was 63).mise run all— exit 0.zizmorclean on the new workflow.