WatchPage 0.1.2

Watch webpages for changes

WatchPage

Description: Watch webpages for changes

Copyright: 2022 Fabio Castelli (Muflone) [e-mail]

License: GPL-3+

Source code: https://github.com/muflone/watchpage

Documentation: http://www.muflone.com/watchpage/

Description

WatchPage is a simple tool to watch multiple web pages for changes.

It aims to ease the software maintainers to check for changes to the project sites and get any news based on patterns.

System Requirements

• Python 3.x
• PyYAML 6.0 (https://pypi.org/project/PyYAML/)
• BeautifulSoup4 4.x (https://pypi.org/project/beautifulsoup4/)
• lxml 4.9 (https://pypi.org/project/lxml/)
• html5lib 1.1 (https://pypi.org/project/html5lib/)

Usage

WatchPage is a command line utility and it requires some arguments to be passed:

watchpage --config <CONFIGURATION> --results <RESULTS> [--dump]

The argument --config refers to a valid YAML configuration file (see below for some examples).

The argument --results must be the path to a directory where to save the results files.

The argument --dump will show the results but it will discard the changes, so they will not be saved in the directory specified in the --results argument.

An example to execute WatchPage will be the following:

watchpage --config docs/muflone_apps.yaml --results output

All the targets specified in the configuration file muflone_apps.yaml will be processed, results will be saved in the output directory and the differences will be printed in the stdout.

Launching again the previous command you will not get any results as there will not be further changes after the previous run. The saved items will be stored in the directory specified in the results argument.

Adding --dump you can observe the returned values but the changes will not be saved.

Configuration file

A configuration file is a YAML specification file with the following values:

• NAME: a unique string to identify the target to process
• URL: the page URL to monitor for changes
• PARSER: the parser to use to process the URL. This can be either:
  • html.parser: this will use the default Python HTML parser
  • html5: this will use html5lib to process the page
  • lxml: this will use lxml HTML parser
  • xml: this will use lxml XML parser
• TYPE: specify the type of items to process from the page. This value can be:
  • links: will get all the anchors from a HTML page
  • rss: will get all the link items from a RSS feed
  • text: will process the page as a simple text file
• ABSOLUTE_URLS: a boolean value (true/false) to make the processed URLs as absolute by appending the website from the URL page
• FILTERS: a list of filters to apply to find the matched items. This can be any of the following:
  • STARTS: the item must begin with the specified string
  • NOT STARTS: the item must not begin with the specified string
  • ENDS: the item must end with the specified string
  • NOT ENDS: the item must not end with the specified string
  • CONTAINS: the item must contain the specified string
  • NOT CONTAINS: the item must not contain the specified string
  • REGEX: the item must match the specified regular expression string
  • NOT REGEX: the item must not match the specified regular expression string
• STATUS: a boolean value (true/false) to enable or disable the target

Configuration example files

Some configuration example files can be found in the docs directory.

NAME: gnome-appfolders-manager
URL: https://github.com/muflone/gnome-appfolders-manager/tags
PARSER: html5
TYPE: links
ABSOLUTE_URLS: true
FILTERS:
  - STARTS: https://github.com/muflone/
  - ENDS: .tar.gz
STATUS: true

This configuration file will use the html5 parser to scan all the links in the page that begin with https://github.com/muflone/ and ending with .tar.gz

---

NAME: dbeaver_plugins
URL: https://dbeaver.io/update/ce/latest/plugins/
PARSER: html.parser
TYPE: text
FILTERS:
  - CONTAINS: .jar
STATUS: false

This configuration file will use the html parser to scan all the lines in the page containing the text .jar

---

NAME: gmtp
URL: https://sourceforge.net/projects/gmtp/rss
PARSER: xml
TYPE: rss
FILTERS:
  - ENDS: .tar.gz/download
STATUS: true

This configuration file will use the xml parser to scan all the links in the RSS feed ending with .tar.gz/download