webchanges checks web content and notifies you via e-mail (or one of many other supported services) if a change is detected. webchanges can also check the output of local commands. The notification includes the changed URL or command and a summary of what has changed. This project is a fork of urlwatch as suggested by its author to optimize it for HTML.
webchanges enables anonymous notifications of web content changes.
You should use the latest version of Python if possible. If you’re using an older version, be aware that for each minor version (3.x), only the latest bugfix release (3.x.y) is supported. Older Python versions are supported for 3 years after being obsoleted by a new major release.
pip install webchanges
The documentation is hosted on Read the Docs .
- Create the default
config.yaml
(configuration) andjobs.yaml
(jobs) files and open an editor to add your jobs to the latter by running:
webchanges --edit
- To change the default configuration, e.g. to receive reports (change notifications) by e-mail and/or one of many other methods, run:
webchanges --edit-config
webchanges
This checks the sources in your jobs and will report on (e.g. display) any changes found from the previous run.
webchanges does not include a scheduler. We recommend using a system scheduler to automatically run webchanges periodically:
- On Linux or macOS, you can use cron; crontab.guru will build a schedule expression for you (if you have never used cron before, see here).
- On Windows, you can use the built-in Windows Task Scheduler.
The code and issues tracker are hosted on GitHub.
We welcome any contribution, e.g. documentation, bug reports, new features, etc., as both pull requests and issues. More information for developers and documentation editors is here, and our wishlist is here.
Released under the MIT License, but including code licensed under the BSD 3-Clause License. See the license here.
You can seamlessly upgrade from urlwatch 2.23 (see here) and benefit from many HTML-focused improvements including:
- Report links are clickable!
- Formatting such as bolding / headers, italics, underlining, list bullets (•) and indentation is preserved
- Uses color and strikethrough to highlight added and deleted lines, and long lines wrap around
- HTML is rendered correctly by email clients who override stylesheets (e.g. Gmail)
- Other legibility improvements
- Multiple changes to how Pyppeteer is run (for websites that need JavaScript rendering before capture) increasing stability, reliability, flexibility and control
- New filters such as additions_only, which makes it easier to track content that was added without the distractions of the content that was deleted
- Better documentation
- More reliability and stability, including a 33 percentage point increase in testing coverage
- Many other additions, refinements and fixes (see detailed information)
Examples: