Troubleshooting external link failures

[MikeMcC399]

It is not unusual for link checking to fail on external links. Troubleshooting should try to identify if this is a soft error, which recovers on its own (perhaps due to activities on a third-party server being tested or because the server was rate-limiting access), or if it is a hard error which does not disappear after re-trying or waiting a day or two.

Examine the logs and find which link is failing.

• Attempt to open the link manually in a browser
• Re-run the test
• Find out if the results are different when the test is run locally compared to running on GitHub.

When the test is run locally with npm run test:links, logging information is output to the terminal window which started the test. In addition, if the tested link responds with an HTTP error code, there will be a corresponding entry in the file cypress/logs/broken_links_result.txt. The GitHub workflow test-check_links.yml saves files from the logs directory as an artifact in the action log if there is a failure. The corresponding zip file can be downloaded from GitHub and examined.

If it is determined that the server cannot be tested reliably with automatic checking, it can be removed from the checks. The hostname, which in some cases can be found in the broken_links_result.txt log file, can be added to the list noCheckHosts in cypress/e2e/hybrid/check_links.cy.js to avoid testing this site.