cherry pick #4792 to release-2.1 (#4793)

Signed-off-by: ti-srebot <[email protected]>

Co-authored-by: Keke Yi <[email protected]>

.github/workflows/link-check.yaml

@@ -0,0 +1,31 @@
+name: external-link-check
+
+on: [pull_request]
+
+jobs:
+  base:
+    runs-on: ubuntu-18.04
+    steps:
+      - name: Check out code
+        uses: actions/checkout@v2
+
+      # NOTE:
+      #  - the check process can be very fast,
+      #    but if `-c` is too large then `Too Many Requests (HTTP error 429)` may be reported from `https://github.com/*`.
+      #  - we hardcode `--document-root` to `/github/workspace` in the container now.
+      #  - we use `http://172.*` as sample addresses in some docs, so we need to exclude them.
+      - name: Check external links
+        id: lc
+        uses: peter-evans/link-checker@v1
+        with:
+          args: -c 32 -d /github/workspace -r -x "http://172.*|https://github.com/.*/pull/.*|https://github.com/.*/issues/.*|https://github.com/[^.\n]*$|http://127.0.0.1.*|http://localhost.*|http://.*:.*|https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/.*|http://www.brendangregg.com/perf.html.*|.*.md" .
+
+      - name: Fail if there were external link errors
+        if: ${{ steps.lc.outputs.exit_code }}
+        run: |
+          echo "Please check the broken links reported in the previous step \"Check external links\"."
+          exit ${{ steps.lc.outputs.exit_code }}
+      # Debug via SSH if previous steps failed
+      #- name: Set up tmate session
+      #  if: ${{ failure() }}
+      #  uses: mxschmitt/action-tmate@v2