Cannot suppress redirect output

[bmcfads]

It seems that some things have changed around redirects recently, and now my output (using the GitHub Action) is littered with redirect information. I cannot figure out how to suppress the redirects; I only want to see the error results.

For example, the output shows something like the following for every redirect:

* [200] <https://some-link-that-was-checked.com> | Redirect: Followed 1 redirect resolving to the final status of: OK. 
Redirects: https://some-link-that-was-checked.com --> https://the-link-it-was-redirected-to.com

How do I suppress these? I tried using the --quiet argument x2 with no luck.

[bmcfads]

It's the ## Redirects per input section that I am trying to suppress.

The # Summary and ## Errors per input sections appear above the redirects, so I have have to scroll up through hundreds of redirect outputs to find the actual errors.

[mre]

Right now we only print redirects in verbose mode (-v and above). @thomas-zahner, maybe we should introduce a dedicated flag for that?

[bmcfads]

@mre - I might be doing something wrong then.

I tried adding --quiet to the list of args for the GitHub Action and it didn't suppress the redirect output. I then tried adding the quiet flag a second time in the list of args, and that didn't work either.

Do you have an example of how to suppress the redirects per input info that comes after the summary, when using the GitHub Action?

[mre]

The default lychee-action args contain --verbose, so maybe that's the problem:

https://github.com/lycheeverse/lychee-action/blob/79de8811d696d79a713d425d265c9870b929fbf2/action.yml#L6

You'd have to overwrite the args.

- name: Link Checker
  uses: lycheeverse/lychee-action@v2
  with:
    # Check all markdown, html and reStructuredText files in repo (same as default, but no `--verbose`)
    args: --no-progress './**/*.md' './**/*.html' './**/*.rst'

If that doesn't work, can you show me your lychee workflow? Just paste the relevant parts here.

[bmcfads]

Yes, the args are overwritten. These are the args I had been using:

- name: Check links
      uses: lycheeverse/lychee-action@v2
      with:
        args: >-
          --root-dir "${{ github.workspace }}"
          --no-progress
          --fallback-extensions mdx
          --include-fragments
          --include-mail
          --exclude-all-private
          --exclude-path "(^|\/)\."
          --accept 100..=103,200..=299,403,429
          "./**/*.mdx"

When I add --quiet to that list, it has no effect. The redirects per input are still printed.

[mre]

Yes, I tried it locally with a test command that I know does redirect. Works as expected:

echo 'https://www.evernote.com' | lychee --root-dir $(pwd) --no-progress --fallback-extensions mdx --include-fragments --include-mail --exclude-all-private --exclude-path "(^|\/)\." --accept 100..=103,200..=299,403,429 "./**/*.mdx" -

Getting contents for input source: ./**/*.mdx
Getting contents for input source: stdin
Resolving input source: ./**/*.mdx
    [WARN] ./**/*.mdx: No files found for this input source
     [200] https://www.evernote.com/
🔍 1 Total (in 0s) ✅ 0 OK 🚫 0 Errors 🔀 1 Redirects

Only when I set --verbose do I see the redirects:

echo 'https://www.evernote.com' | lychee --root-dir $(pwd) --no-progress --fallback-extensions mdx --include-fragments --include-mail --exclude-all-private --exclude-path "(^|\/)\." --accept 100..=103,200..=299,403,429 "./**/*.mdx" --verbose -

Getting contents for input source: ./**/*.mdx
Getting contents for input source: stdin
Resolving input source: ./**/*.mdx
    [WARN] ./**/*.mdx: No files found for this input source
     [200] https://www.evernote.com/ | Redirect: Followed 1 redirect resolving to the final status of: OK. Redirects: https://www.evernote.com/ --> https://evernote.com/

🔍 1 Total (in 0s) ✅ 0 OK 🚫 0 Errors 🔀 1 Redirects

However, lychee-action sets the format to Markdown here.

So you'd have to overwrite that parameter as well. E.g. try --format detailed or setting the format with the foramat arg.
For machine-readable parsing, you can also try --format json.

[bmcfads]

@mre - thanks for the feedback.

Yes, it was the summary output from the lychee-action that I was talking about. Before the team fixed something with the redirects, the Markdown output was quite nice. It looked good and only showed the issues (errors and timeouts). Then something changed (was fixed) with the redirects and the redirect output is now shown in the Markdown summary, which makes it quite noisy and, if you have a lot of redirects, buries the issues that matter.

I have switched the output format to compact. That only shows the errors, but it's not as neatly displayed as the Markdown was. I guess what I was used to was a compact Markdown output mode.

[thomas-zahner]

This is related to #1312 and the change you talk about was #1433. I see what you mean. The intention with the new redirect reporting is that users get notified about redirects, because commonly a redirect (at least a permanent redirect) is something users should be made aware of. When lychee reports a permanent redirect, I believe that users should ideally update the URL to the redirected destination URL, because the redirect suggests that the original URL might soon become invalid. So ideally users treat their redirecting URLs just like broken URLs and fix them. (though this is a bit opinionated)

So I would like to propose that we keep the current behaviour of showing redirected URLs in the markdown output by default. But I do understand that users might want a way to disable this. So I think it should be a good solution if we use -q/--quiet to hide the redirects form the markdown output. This way you could still get the "old" markdown output.

[mre]

Alternatively, we could show a note instead?

lychee detected 23 redirects. For better stability, consider replacing them with final URLs. Use --verbose to list them.

[bmcfads]

@thomas-zahner - good point about actually fixing the redirects, I hadn't thought of that. 😆

Either solution, showing redirects by default but using the quiet flag to suppress them or hiding them by default and adding a note about using the verbose flag to show them, works for me.