Support » Plugin: Broken Link Checker » 2.0 – error about running on localhost

2.0 – error about running on localhost

  • lozula

    (@lozula)


    3 months ago

    When I start the new scan it runs and finds tens of thousands of links, but then an error message pops up on my WP BLC dashboard:

    Scan could not be started because it seems you are on localhost. Broken Links Checker API can not reach sites on local hosts

    How do I resolve this?

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Plugin Support Luis – WPMU DEV Support

    (@wpmudev-support7)

    3 months ago

    Hi @lozula

    Hope you are doing fine.

    BLC 2.0 checks the broken links by crawling a site using an external action performed from our API servers (Instead or checking from within the site). Since a localhost setup is not available publicly, the API won’t be able to reach the site and perform a scan.

    In order to perform the scan on the site, we’d recommend setting up a staging site, so it can be accessed by the BLC 2.0 crawler.

    Hope this info helps

    Kind regards

    Luis

    Thread Starter lozula

    (@lozula)

    3 months ago

    Hi,

    Thanks for the quick response. I should have been more clear, the site is not a localhost setup, it’s a public site that has been live for years. So I don’t understand why it is having this error message.

    thanks

    Laurence

    Thread Starter lozula

    (@lozula)

    3 months ago

    If it helps my site is findingtheuniverse.com. It’s possible a security configuration is blocking access, but it’s odd because it scans the dashboard seems to be scanning the links. It just never seems to complete and I get the error message about localhost.

    Thread Starter lozula

    (@lozula)

    3 months ago

    I updated my site security plugin to whitelist the IP address as outlined in the troubleshooting guide. However, the same problem occurs, the hub seems to get to the end of scanning, and then the error message appears on the BLC page of my WordPress dashboard “Scan could not be started because it seems you are on localhost. Broken Links Checker API can not reach sites on local hosts”

    Plugin Support Luis – WPMU DEV Support

    (@wpmudev-support7)

    3 months ago

    Hi @lozula

    It seems the site uses Cloudflare, could you please confirm the IP you whitelisted is : 165.227.127.103?

    And could you also make sure the User Agent is whitelisted as well? Even though the IP has been whitelisted, UA may still be blocked. You can follow these steps:

    • First, log in to the Cloudflare account and select the Security tab from the left menu.
    • Next , select WAF go to the Firewall rules tab.
    • Click on Create firewall Rule.
    • Then, give a name to the Firewall rule.
    • Set Field to User Agent, Equals as the Operator, and Value to: WPMU DEV Broken Link Checker Spider
    • Select the Allow option
    • To complete the setup, click on Deploy in the bottom-right corner.

    Let know if the crawl is successful after applying this settings.

    Kind regards

    Luis

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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