EPUBCheck

EPUBCheck is the official conformance checker for EPUB publications. EPUBCheck can be run as a standalone command-line tool or used as a Java library.

EPUBCheck is open source software, maintained by the DAISY Consortium on behalf of W3C.

We Need Your Support!!
Financial support is critical to the development of EPUBCheck, the tool we all use to validate EPUB files. We need to make sure that the resources are adequate to both update the tool and provide for its continued maintenance over the next two years; please help us fund and support EPUBCheck, and join the list of donators!

Downloads

Check the releases page to get the latest distribution.

EPUBCheck v5.4.0 is the latest production-ready release, to be used to validate both EPUB 2 and 3 files. EPUB 3 publications are checked against the EPUB 3.4 specification.

Documentation

Documentation on how to use EPUBCheck, to contribute to the project or to translate messages is available on the EPUBCheck wiki.

Technical discussions are held on our public mailing list. To subscribe to the mailing list, send an email with subject subscribe to public-epubcheck-request@w3.org. To participate in the discussion, simply send an email to public-epubcheck@w3.org.

Historical archives of discussions prior to October 2017 are stored at the old EPUBCheck Google Group.

Building EPUBCheck

Build from sources

To build epubcheck from the sources you need Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.7 or above and Apache Maven 3.0 or above installed.

Build and run tests:

$ mvn clean install

Will copy *.jar files and packages to target/ folder...

Build using docker

To build the epubcheck using docker, use the build command below:

$ docker build . -t epubcheck

To run the epubcheck image as container, use example command below:

# A host directory must be mounted to /data inside the container using a Docker volume.
# This mounted path acts as a shared workspace, allowing both the host and container
# to access the EPUB file as well as any generated output files.
$ docker run -it --rm -v <directory>:/data epubcheck --help
$ docker run -it --rm -v <directory>:/data epubcheck <epub-file> [OPTIONS]

# Example 1:
# Run EPUB validation for sample.epub located in the current directory.
# Validation results will be printed directly to the console.
$ docker run -it --rm -v .:/data epubcheck sample.epub

# Example 2:
# Run EPUB validation for sample.epub located in /home/username on the host.
# Validation results will be printed directly to the console.
$ docker run -it --rm -v /home/username:/data epubcheck sample.epub

# Example 3:
# Run EPUB validation for sample.epub located in /home/username on the host,
# and generate a JSON report at /data/output.json inside the container.
# Since /data inside the container is mapped to the host directory,
# the generated file will also be available at /home/username/output.json
$ docker run -it --rm -v /home/username:/data epubcheck sample.epub --json output.json

Credits

EPUBCheck is currently maintained by the DAISY Consortium, on behalf of W3C.

Initial EPUBCheck development was largely done at Adobe. A significant part of EPUBCheck functionality comes from the schema validation tool Jing, used with schemas from the Nu HTML Checker, IDPF, and DAISY.

Past and present EPUBCheck developers include: Romain Deltour, Matt Garrish, Tobias Fischer, Markus Gylling, Steve Antoch, Peter Sorotokin, Thomas Ledoux, Masayoshi Takahashi, Paul Norton, Piotr Kula, Arwen Pond, Liza Daly, Garth Conboy, and several others.

Many thanks to the numerous people who have contributed to the evolution of EPUBCheck through bug reports, pull requests, and translations!