url_check: Check urls in a package or project

In urlchecker: Run CRAN URL Checks from Older R Versions

Check urls in a package or project

Description

For an R package, runs the url_db_from_package_source function in the tools package along with functions to check URLs in un-rendered Rmarkdown (.Rmd) and Quarto (.qmd) vignettes and in BibTeX (.bib) bibliographies. For non-package projects, URLs are extracted from all supported files found in the given directories.

Usage

url_check(
  path = ".",
  db = NULL,
  parallel = TRUE,
  pool = curl::new_pool(),
  progress = TRUE,
  fail = TRUE
)

Arguments

path	Path(s) to check. Each element may be: A package's (development) source directory tree, a directory holding an unpacked source package, or a source package tarball (.tar.gz). A tarball is unpacked into a temporary directory (kept for the rest of the session, so the printed report can point into the sources). A directory that is not an R package. All supported files found within (recursively) are scanned for URLs. Supported files are HTML, PDF, Rd, Markdown (.md, .markdown), R Markdown (.Rmd), Quarto (.qmd) and BibTeX (.bib). A single file of one of the supported types above. path may be a character vector mixing any of these.
db	A url database
parallel	If TRUE, check the URLs in parallel
pool	A multi handle created by curl::new_pool(). If NULL use a global pool.
progress	Whether to show the progress bar for parallel checks
fail	If TRUE (the default), throw an error when one or more URLs are flagged, after printing the report. This yields a non-zero exit status, which is useful in CI/CD workflows. Set to FALSE to return the results instead of failing.

Value

A url_checker_db object (invisibly). This is a check_url_db object with an added class with a custom print method.

Ignoring URLs with .urlignore

Some URLs cannot be checked automatically, e.g. a link to a private repository, or a page behind a login or captcha. To stop url_check() from flagging (and even requesting) such URLs, list them in a .urlignore file. It is read from two locations relative to the checked root, and the patterns found are combined:

• .urlignore in the root directory (like .gitignore), and

• tools/.urlignore (handy for packages that keep it under ⁠tools/⁠).

Each non-empty line is a glob pattern (blank lines and lines starting with ⁠#⁠ are ignored), matched against the whole URL. For example ⁠https://github.com/acme/secret⁠ matches that URL exactly, while ⁠https://github.com/acme/*⁠ matches every URL under that path. Matching URLs are dropped before checking, so they are never requested.

Note that CRAN's own URL checks do not read .urlignore, so an ignored URL may still be flagged when the package is submitted to CRAN.

Examples

## Not run: 
url_check("my_pkg")
url_check(c("README.md", "docs"))

## End(Not run)

urlchecker documentation built on July 8, 2026, 5:07 p.m.