Broken link

A link, or a page’s redirect_to, points at an address on the site where the built site has nothing. A reader who follows it lands on a missing page.

What you’ll see

warning  Broken link: nothing is published at `/about-us/`
  Did you mean `/about/`?
  More: https://statac.dev/e/broken-link/

In the terminal the message also names the file and line where there is one, and marks the exact text.

Why Statac warns

Statac knows every address it publishes, so once the site is built it follows every link on every page to one on the site, as a browser would, and tells you when one leads to none of them. A link in your writing is shown at its line; one a template or snippet wrote is shown at the line that wrote it, with the page it is on. Statac publishes the page with the link as you wrote it, because the link may point at something you are about to add. A redirect is published the same way. Links to other sites are left alone: a build never fetches anything.

How to fix it

Point the link at an address the site has. When a published address is close to the one you wrote, Statac offers it. A link names a page by its address, not its file: where one names a file under content/, such as post-2.md, Statac offers that page’s address. If the link is right and the page is still to come, the warning goes once the page is published. If something other than Statac publishes there, such as another program on the same host, name the path in not_ours: [/path/] in statac.yaml.

On a site published under a path, such as /blog/, a link written from the top of the domain, such as /about/, leads outside the site, and Statac leaves it as written. Where the site publishes /blog/about/, Statac offers the way to link inside the site wherever it is published: @url(/about/) in the writing, {{ url("/about/") }} in a template.

Example

In content/post-1.md:

Read [Post 2](/post-2/) next.

If content/post-2.md is published at /posts/post-2/, write the link as:

Read [Post 2](/posts/post-2/) next.

Its name

Name	broken-link
In the terminal	statac explain broken-link
To stop showing it	quiet: [broken-link] in statac.yaml, once you have understood it. Statac still counts it.